Hongda Fan, a leading Chinese expert and professor at Shanghai International Studies University's Middle East Studies Institute, tells Newsweek that the United States has indeed ignored the urgent needs of Middle Eastern countries for development, signaling that the end of the American century begins in the Middle East.
Chinese official communications often echo a phrase of President Xi Jinping's about "great changes unseen in a century." Increasingly that line seems less like propaganda and more like a simple statement of a vast transformation in the world order.
This overhaul, years in the making, is taking the clearest shape right now in the Middle East, a region where the U.S. has devoted many resources in the 21st century. In March, China helped arrange a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, taking the kind of broker role in the region long held by the U.S. Washington currently has no diplomatic ties with Tehran and relations with Riyadh have grown strained.
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