With little advanced warning, Egypt's new leader, Mohamed Morsi jetted to Beijing for a three-day state visit in August, the first major trip outside the country since being inaugurated as president on June 30. Morsi's visit signals a major shift in Egypt foreign policy after more than 30 years of clear orientation with the West.
Prior to Morsi's Beijing trip, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Cairo on her Africa safari, and many thought that Morsi would be heading to Washington for his first international engagement. After all President Obama made his defining speech of new policy engagement with the region from Egypt's famous Cairo University. Historically, Cairo and Beijing have long been friends. From the moment Egypt's enigmatic revolutionary leader Abdel Nasser met the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, there has been a strong bond. In fact a year later in 1956, China opened its very first diplomatic mission in Africa in Cairo.
Even with pro-Western former President Mubarak in the saddle, China enjoyed a pride of place in Egypt's foreign policy. With Morsi elevating Sino-Egyptian bilateral relations to prime place, Beijing's dynamic and productive relations with Africa have had a major impetus. Egypt is no ordinary nation in the constellation of forces in the Middle East and North Africa and therefore Cairo's new visible orientation in international relations will certainly reverberate in several capitals in the region.
In the run-up to Morsi's inauguration two months ago, Egypt had been in turbulence with clear fissures in its economy. Morsi's political background as a member of the long persecuted Muslim Brotherhood makes reading his political temperament a murky business. In just two months, he has shown a firm hand, curbing the fearsome military of its excess power and seeing off its most notorious henchmen in a seemingly dignified retirement. He took a further decisive step in articulating Cairo's new priority in foreign relations with an eye on the international complimentarity to the domestic challenge of rebuilding the country's economy, shattered in the long months of political upheaval.
In Beijing, Morsi, who came calling with an 80-member business delegation, signed bilateral cooperative agreements spanning such areas as telecommunication, agriculture and environment. The National Bank of Egypt got a credit line of $200 million from the Beijing trip. Bilateral trade between Egypt and China was already at a whopping $8.8 billion last year, up by 40 percent from the 2008 figures. China has long designated Egypt a tourist destination and China's bourgeoning tourist population are pouring into Egypt in ever greater numbers. The pragmatism in Morsi's foreign policy prioritizing Beijing as a core partner will show its hand sooner rather than later in the speed of recovery and the significant content of China's involvement. China-Africa strategic and new-type partnerships have become a significant part of contemporary international relations.
As in most African states, Egypt clearly needs an infusion of foreign investment to revive and re-invigorate its economy and against the background that the traditional sources in the past have dried up, with the Eurozone battling faltering economies and the United States writhing in a painful downturn, China seemed a pragmatic choice. However, the pragmatism that lay at the heart of the bourgeoning Sino-African cooperation is derived from the traditional solidarity that has existed between the two sides for decades.
Morsi, inheriting a flailing economy, is probably convinced that a goal-getting multilateral process in which China and more than 50 African countries are fruitfully engaged, have even more prospects of delivering concrete results in bilateral state-to-state cooperation.
Morsi may have made a deft political move to balance the political pressure from Washington and the European Union that traditionally accompanies development assistance. This strategy, far from the Cold War era of banging the heads of the two major superpower protagonists to extract concession, has its real utility in Beijing's commitment to viable and productive cooperation with Africa.
Morsi has undertaken one of the most brilliant and pragmatic re-definitions of foreign policy of a major African power. As China has taken its African policy very seriously and pursues it with creative and imaginative vigor, individual African states would conversely be exhorted to define a more robust China policy, integrated and enabling of the broader Africa-China cooperation. Such national policy, like Egypt's, of fruitful bilateral engagement with Beijing can only add to the extant dynamism of the overall Africa-China cooperation. From these perspectives, Morsi's pioneering effort to broaden and consolidate Egypt-China bilateral relations is commendable.
