For more than a decade, assessments of Chinese strategy in the Middle East and Africa have focused on assets, including the ports Chinese firms own, the pipelines they finance, and the networks they build. This lens has produced familiar maps of Chinese “footholds” and debates over future military bases, but ownership alone reveals less about influence.
The more useful question is not what China owns, but how Chinese firms become embedded in the operational and digital systems that keep trade corridors moving. Influence derives not from controlling infrastructure outright but from participating in the governance of the networks that move goods, data, finance, and information across them.
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