Xi Jinping’s Cairo trip marks ‘best ties in history’ as Egypt seeks to balance West

Chinese President Xi Jinping is returning to Egypt after a decade as Beijing deepens its economic, military and diplomatic ties with Cairo and seeks to work more closely with Egypt on crises across the Middle East and Africa.
Xi will visit Egypt this week following his trip to Kyrgyzstan for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit, which finishes on Tuesday.
China’s foreign ministry last week described relations with Egypt as being “at their best in history” and said Xi’s visit would build on past cooperation while setting the direction for future ties. The visit coincides with the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations.

It will be Xi’s first visit to Egypt since January 2016, when he addressed the Arab League in Cairo and witnessed the signing of agreements covering infrastructure, energy, finance and industrial development.
By contrast, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi has visited China eight times since taking office in 2014, most recently in May 2024.
John Calabrese, a non-resident senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said Xi’s visit offered political benefits to both sides.

“The visit provides Beijing with an opportunity to showcase a durable, non-Western partnership with a major Arab, African and Global South state,” Calabrese said. For Egypt, it offered a way to show that it was “not a tool of the US or the West more broadly”.
Calabrese expects the two governments to reaffirm their comprehensive strategic partnership and possibly announce agreements on trade, investment, belt and road cooperation and the use of the yuan in bilateral transactions.
In 2023, Egypt became Africa’s first sovereign issuer of a panda bond, raising 3.5 billion yuan (US$520 million) on China’s domestic debt market. Beijing and Cairo renewed their bilateral currency-swap agreement in June, expanding it from 18 billion yuan to 30 billion yuan for another three years.
China’s economic ties with Egypt have expanded rapidly, with bilateral trade reaching about US$20.8 billion in 2025, up from US$17.38 billion a year earlier, according to data from the Egyptian Commercial Service.
Much of China’s industrial investment is concentrated near the Suez Canal, a maritime artery connecting Asia with Europe through the Red Sea and Mediterranean.
By the end of 2025, the China-Egypt TEDA Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in Ain Sokhna was hosting nearly 200 companies, with reported investment of more than US$3.8 billion and about 10,000 jobs created. China Jushi, one of the zone’s largest manufacturers, has established a major fibreglass production base serving export markets in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.
“The relationship is increasingly about industrial investment, not simply trade,” Calabrese said.

Egypt was positioning itself as a manufacturing base for Chinese companies seeking access to European and African markets, Calabrese said. But foreign-currency shortages, debt pressures and bureaucracy remained obstacles, while Cairo’s reliance on Gulf and Western financing limited how far it could shift towards Beijing, he said.
Amr Adly, an associate professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, said Chinese investment had risen rapidly over the past decade, although investors from Britain, the United States and Gulf states still held larger stocks of foreign direct investment.
He said further growth could come from integrating Egyptian companies into Chinese-led supply chains serving European, African and Gulf markets.

Military cooperation is also expanding. Egypt and China began their second Eagles of Civilisation joint air exercise on August 22, days before Xi’s visit. China deployed J-16 fighters more than 6,000km (3,730 miles) to Egypt, supported by mid-air refuelling from a YY-20A tanker, showcasing the growing ability of the Chinese air force to operate far from home.
While Egypt has relied for decades on US military assistance, expanding exercises with China points to Cairo’s efforts to diversify its defence relationships.
“Egypt is interested in balancing its relationship with the US by deepening cooperation with China,” Adly said.
“On Gaza, there is broad alignment,” Calabrese said. “Both Beijing and Cairo support a ceasefire, Palestinian statehood and Egypt’s mediating and reconstruction role.”

On Iran, he said: “I see only partial alignment.”
“Both favour de-escalation and neither wants a wider conflict that disrupts Suez and Red Sea shipping.”
But he added that Beijing’s deeper ties with Tehran and opposition to Washington’s pressure meant coordination with Cairo was likely to remain limited to calls for restraint.
The Red Sea and Persian Gulf were important to Chinese interests, Adly said.
Although China had acted as mediator in 2023 to restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, “the Chinese haven’t been as keen on intervening with the ongoing conflict”.
Zhao Jun, director of the African Arab Countries Research Project and an associate professor at the Middle East Studies Institute of Shanghai International Studies University, said China needed Egypt as a regional “pivot” connecting the Arab world, Africa, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Egypt, meanwhile, hoped to use Chinese investment, technology and market access to advance industrialisation and expand its diplomatic room for manoeuvre, he said.
Zhao said the next phase of economic cooperation could focus on electric vehicles, solar power and energy storage, green hydrogen, desalination, artificial intelligence and port logistics.
“Financing will also rely more heavily on [yuan] settlement, panda bonds, equity investment, industrial funds and public-private partnerships, reducing dependence on sovereign loans,” Zhao said.
“Ultimately, the key measure of the visit’s success is not how many agreements are signed, but whether political trust can be translated into highly localised industrial projects that are bankable, operational and exportable.”
Zhao said the “visit is expected to shape a division of labour in which Egypt leverages its advantages in on-the-ground mediation while China provides international political and development resources”.