About China-MENA Newsletter

China-MENA Newsletter

The China-MENA Newsletter is an English-language newsletter published on Substack that covers China's engagement with the Middle East and North Africa. Written by Jonathan Fulton, an associate professor of political science at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, it publishes analysis, link roundups, book reviews and translations of Chinese commentary on the Middle East three to four times a week. Fulton launched the newsletter in May 2024 as an open-access publication and moved it to paid subscriptions in October 2024, while continuing to publish occasional free posts. Although the newsletter is written from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, its subject is Beijing's trade, investment, diplomacy and security relationships across the Middle East and North Africa, a field in which its author has worked for more than fifteen years.

Founder and editor

Jonathan Fulton is an associate professor of political science at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, and a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Middle East Programs and its Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative. The Atlantic Council's biography of him states that he received his doctorate from the University of Leicester, where his dissertation focused on Chinese relations with the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. His research focuses on China's relations with countries of the Middle East, looking mostly at the Gulf countries, and more broadly on the international relations of the Persian Gulf, Chinese foreign policy and Asia-Middle East relations.

That academic base matters to the newsletter's character. The China-MENA Newsletter is not a newsroom product with correspondents across the region; it is a single-scholar publication, written by a specialist who reads the academic, policy and media debate on China in the Middle East every day and filters it for readers. In his welcome post, Fulton introduced himself in exactly those terms, as a Zayed University professor and Atlantic Council fellow whose research focuses on China's relations with the Middle East, and explained that his doctoral dissertation, on China-Gulf Cooperation Council relations, became his first book.

Fulton also hosts the China-MENA Podcast for the Atlantic Council. In his welcome post he noted that the podcast was then wrapping up its second season. The newsletter and the podcast cover the same territory from the same institutional base, one in written form several times a week and the other as an interview and discussion programme, and together they form the public-facing side of his research programme.

Books and research background

Fulton came to newsletter writing with a substantial publication record. Biographies published by the Atlantic Council, the National University of Singapore's Middle East Institute and other institutions credit him with five books and more than one hundred academic, policy and opinion publications on China-Middle East relations. His books include China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies, published in 2019, which grew out of his doctoral research, and the Routledge Handbook of China-Middle East Relations, which he edited and which, in his own description, includes contributions from twenty-six experts covering nearly every facet of China-Middle East relations the editors could cover. Other book-length work credited to him in institutional biographies includes External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies, co-edited with Li-Chen Sim, and Asian Perceptions of Gulf Security, published in 2023.

His shorter work has appeared across academic journals, edited volumes and policy outlets. A reading list of his own and others' work on China and Iran, published in the newsletter, cites his article on the China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership as a tale of two regional security complexes, and his 2021 article in Middle East Policy on China between Iran and the Gulf monarchies. The Atlantic Council has published his analysis regularly, including a March 2025 issue brief titled Present without impact? How the Middle East perceives China's diplomatic engagement. He has also written analysis commissioned by governments; in the newsletter he described a report the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defence asked him to write, based on interviews with analysts from around the region in December 2024 and January 2025, which the Ministry permitted him to publish with the Atlantic Council.

This background shapes what the newsletter does. Rather than breaking news, it explains a relationship: how Chinese trade, contracting, energy purchases, investment and diplomacy interact with Gulf, Iranian, Israeli, Egyptian and North African politics, and how analysts inside and outside China interpret those interactions.

Launch in May 2024

Fulton launched the China-MENA Newsletter in May 2024. His first post was dated 11 May 2024, and in his welcome message he set out the intended format. He planned for the newsletter to be a regularly updated look at trends in China's engagement in the Middle East, and said he would also write about trends in the region that were shaping events, as well as Asian countries' growing presence in the Middle East and North Africa more generally. He said he would be adding book reviews, sharing translations of Chinese analysis on the Middle East, and hoped to include interviews with other people working on the subject.

At launch the newsletter was open access. In the welcome post Fulton said that for the moment he was making it an open-access newsletter, but that the plan was to transition into a paid subscription model if he kept the momentum going. That conditional plan was carried out within the newsletter's first six months, once its publication rhythm and readership had been established.

The pace of publication was high from the start. In his December 2024 year-in-review post, Fulton recorded that his 140th post had appeared during that first partial year, which implies an average of roughly four to five posts a week between May and December, including analysis pieces, link posts and reviews. The same year-in-review reported more than 20,300 views in the preceding thirty days, a figure he published as the newsletter's own measure of its early audience.

Move to paid subscriptions

On 15 October 2024, the China-MENA Newsletter moved to paid subscriptions, priced at twelve dollars per month or one hundred and twenty dollars per year, with a longer monthly essay reserved for paying subscribers. Fulton announced the change in a subscription post, explaining that the newsletter would continue alongside free material but that its full output would sit behind the paywall. The model is the standard Substack arrangement for specialist publications: free subscribers receive occasional posts and previews, while paid subscribers receive the full run of analysis, roundups and the monthly long essay.

The pricing did not remain fixed. In a later post, Fulton told readers that he had finally sorted out an ongoing payment issue, hoped it was resolved, and had returned to the paid subscription model, with occasional free posts and content but the majority behind the paywall. In the same post he said he had reduced the price by half, because a lot of subscribers were students who had found it hard to justify one hundred and twenty dollars, so that an annual subscription was sixty dollars. That detail is revealing about the newsletter's audience: alongside policymakers and professionals, it is read by students of international relations and Middle East studies who follow Fulton's academic work.

Fulton has described the paywall decisions frankly in the newsletter itself, including breaks in publication. A Christmas-period post, for example, told readers he was technically taking a break but would share analysis-free links for those who were not, and republished the standard notice that the China-MENA Newsletter is a reader-supported publication and that readers could support the work by becoming free or paid subscribers. The publication is therefore best understood as reader-funded specialist analysis, not as an institutional bulletin: Zayed University and the Atlantic Council provide its author's positions and platforms, but the newsletter itself is his own Substack, supported by its subscribers.

Format and regular features

The newsletter publishes three to four times a week, in several recurring formats. The first is original analysis, in which Fulton develops an argument about a current development in China-Middle East relations, often drawing on his own research concepts. The second is the link roundup, in which he collects relevant stories that have crossed his attention over the preceding days, from Chinese state media such as Xinhua, regional outlets such as Tehran Times and Amwaj, United Nations statements and think-tank publications, sometimes with commentary and sometimes, as he puts it, analysis-free. The third is the book review and reading list: periodic, often non-paywalled posts recommending books, documents and articles, which Fulton has said reflect the professor in him wanting to recommend and promote work that deserves a broader audience.

A fourth feature, promised at launch and delivered regularly, is the translation and presentation of Chinese commentary on the Middle East. In one such post, Fulton collected commentary from China on a war involving Iran, explaining that he preferred to share what Chinese analysts themselves thought rather than commentary from writers who had not studied China. He highlighted recurring Chinese analysts whose work he returns to frequently, among them Fan Hongda, Zhang Chuchu and Jin Liangxiang, and summarised common threads in the Chinese debate, including a deep concern about escalation and the view that Beijing prizes stability because of its economics-driven approach to the region.

The newsletter also republishes or shares Fulton's longer essays. In one post he explained that a piece had been written for another publication which declined to run it, that he had put a fair amount of time into writing it, and that he was therefore sharing it with newsletter readers as part of a plan to publish more long-form essays. That use of the newsletter, as a home for serious writing that does not fit a commissioning outlet's focus, is part of its value to subscribers.

Themes: the limits of China's Middle East role

A consistent theme runs through Fulton's newsletter analysis: scepticism about claims that China is displacing the United States in the Middle East. In a post on changing narratives on China-MENA, he described attending a January 2025 workshop convened by United States think-tank specialists, at which speaker after speaker reiterated the same point: China is not trying to beat the United States in the Middle East, because China has different interests, different objectives and different approaches. He described a concept he calls peak China-MENA, the period book-ended by President Xi Jinping's December 2022 visit to Saudi Arabia and the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

In Fulton's account, the attack of October 2023 and everything that followed showed the limits of China's diplomacy in the region, and highlighted that its economics-first approach to the Middle East had not yet produced a corresponding security or political presence. He made the same argument in the context of Iran, writing that when it comes to China in Middle Eastern security issues, Beijing acts when its core interests are threatened, and that none of its core interests, as articulated in China's 2009 white paper on peaceful development, including state sovereignty, national security, territorial integrity, national reunification, maintenance of its political system and social stability, and safeguards for economic and social development, can be found in Iran, the Gulf or the Middle East. At the same time he noted the scale of the economic relationship, including that Iranian crude oil trade is important to China.

The newsletter applies the same sceptical lens to Chinese analysis as well as Western analysis. In his post collecting Chinese commentary on a war in Iran, Fulton summarised shared concerns about escalation and loss of control, quoted the Global Times warning of a perilous escalation, and directed readers to essays arguing that killing Iran's leaders strengthens the regime and that the war had damaged the United States' reputation, credibility and soft power. He was explicit about the limits of the sample, noting that the pieces did not represent the whole spectrum of analysis coming out of China.

Coverage beyond the Gulf

Although Fulton's deepest expertise is in the Gulf, the newsletter's remit is the whole Middle East and North Africa, and its coverage has widened over time. In a post asking whether North Africa is the new Gulf, he observed that much of what China does in the Middle East and North Africa is really China in the Gulf, where the majority of China's trade, contracting, energy deals, expatriate population and small and medium businesses are found, but that there had been more action in North Africa over the previous two years. He pointed to his own Atlantic Council writing on China-Egypt ties, to a European Council on Foreign Relations report on Chinese electric vehicles, and to what he described as an unusual surge in Chinese investments into Morocco that kicked off in 2024, alongside stories about Chinese energy relationships and projects in Tunisia and elsewhere in North Africa.

Iran receives sustained attention, reflecting both its importance to China's energy imports and the long scholarly debate about the China-Iran partnership. Fulton's China and Iran reading list, first put together in October 2024 and periodically updated, recommends foundational works including John Garver's China and Iran: Ancient Partners in a Post-Imperial World, alongside chapters and articles on the nuclear negotiations and the comprehensive strategic partnership. Newsletter posts have also followed Iranian domestic unrest, examining how China, described as Iran's most important partner, responded to protests with calls for restraint and dialogue rather than material support.

Energy remains the economic backbone of the coverage. Link roundups regularly include stories on liquefied natural gas, oil trade and energy infrastructure, including reporting on China's natural gas stockpile and on declines in Chinese liquefied natural gas imports, as well as Gulf producers' competition for Chinese energy markets. Infrastructure and trade stories, from Kuwaiti port contracts signed with Chinese firms to Chinese-built solar plants in Tunisia, appear alongside the diplomatic coverage, reflecting the newsletter's premise that China's regional presence is built primarily from commerce.

Audience and standing

The China-MENA Newsletter is recommended by the Sinica podcast's recommendations page, a notable endorsement within the small community of English-language China-watch publications, since Sinica is one of the longest-running English-language podcasts on contemporary China. Within that community, the newsletter fills a geographic gap: most English-language China newsletters focus on China's domestic politics, its economy or its relations with the United States and Europe, while Fulton's publication covers a region, the Middle East and North Africa, where China's footprint is large but English-language specialist coverage is thin.

Its author's institutional standing supports its reach. Fulton speaks at international seminars on his subject, including a National University of Singapore Middle East Institute seminar for which his biography was published, and he is quoted by regional and international media on Gulf-China relations. The Atlantic Council lists his newsletter-adjacent outputs, podcast and issue briefs together, and his analysis has been cited in official reviews of China and the Middle East. For subscribers, the offer is continuity: the same specialist, reading the same region and the same Chinese sources, three to four times a week, in a format shorter than a journal article and more analytical than a news report.

As of its second year, the newsletter had settled into that rhythm: a paid core of frequent analysis, link roundups, translations, reading lists and a longer monthly essay, with occasional free posts, a reduced student-friendly annual price, and an audience Fulton himself measured at more than 20,300 views in a single thirty-day period during its first year. It remains a one-person publication, and its coverage reflects its author's judgement about what matters in China-Middle East relations, above all his recurring conclusion, documented across many posts, that China's economic presence in the region is deep while its political and security influence has hard limits.