Chinese President Xi Jinping touched down in Cairo on Tuesday evening for a highly anticipated visit to Egypt, his first in a decade. Several major roads were closed across the capital in preparation for the visit, with images of Xi and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the flags of both nations adorning the streets, signalling the intention expressed by both presidents to expand cooperation. But three former officials who spoke to Mada Masr about the opportunities and challenges the visit brings stressed that as much as the aim is to develop the relationship with China, the challenge is for Egypt to maintain its own development priorities while navigating between Chinese and United States influence. Coming amid intensifying competition among major powers that places greater pressure on Egypt’s long-standing strategy of diversifying its partnerships, the visit is set to test Cairo’s ability to preserve its strategic autonomy while deepening ties with China. Xi’s visit comes against a rapidly shifting global and regional landscape, from intensifying rivalry between the US and China to a renewed flare up in the war between the US and Iran. The Chinese president arrived in Cairo after meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Kyrgyzstan during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. His high-profile visit to Egypt this week comes with recent talks pointing to expanding partnerships and investments and as Cairo’s relationship with Beijing is also moving into more sensitive areas, with new cooperation in artificial intelligence on the table and as the two countries currently hold their second, large-scale joint air force exercise across several Egyptian airbases. For Cairo, according to former Ambassador to China Ali al-Hefny and former Assistant Foreign Minister Mohamed Hegazy, the developing relationship with China should not be seen as coming at Washington’s expense. Deepening ties with Beijing offers Cairo another avenue to advance its development and national security priorities, they said, while maintaining its longstanding strategic relationship with other partners such as Washington. Can foreign investment and industrial cooperation translate into local gains? Officials have signalled that the visit should expand the existing portfolio of economic cooperation between China and Egypt. Hefny told Mada Masr that Egypt’s priority is not simply to attract investment, but to use the relationship to advance its own development agenda. Egypt, he said, is “obliged to carry on with our development schemes” while seeking to learn from China’s development experience. Repeated high-level exchanges between Cairo and Beijing over the past period, he noted, were aimed at ensuring the “continuity” and “sustainability” of bilateral cooperation and its “real development.” In early August, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbuly expressed his commitment to expanding strategic cooperation with China, pointing to Chinese investments in Egypt surpassing US$10 billion, as he gathered senior Egyptian economic officials and executives from major Chinese companies operating in Egypt. The Investment Ministry has also announced new export contracts with Chinese buyers worth $168 million, as China’s two-year zero-tariff initiative for African exports took effect in May 2026. These developments sit alongside the major Chinese-backed infrastructure projects that have manifested in the last decade, from the New Capital to the Suez Canal Economic Zone, including China’s support for Egypt’s entry into BRICS in 2024 and Egypt’s growing role as a gateway for Chinese companies to access other African and Middle Eastern markets. The challenge for Egypt is to land investments that do more than create jobs or bring in foreign currency, with an emphasis on projects that build deeper capabilities within the local economy. “Our main goal in Egypt in this period is to localize industry,” said Hefny. “China has the possibility and the political will and is ready to help Egypt and our economy by co-producing in Egypt’s industrial sector to allow Egypt to produce more and make some of the foreign currency needed to import our necessities from the outside world.” Like Hefny, Hegazy, who is currently an adviser to the Local Development Ministry and a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, said the relationship with China needs to deliver “tangible economic and strategic gains,” moving beyond trade and investment toward industrialization, technology transfer, knowledge localization and greater added value within the Egyptian economy. That raises a more difficult question for Cairo: whether the growing Chinese presence can translate into the kind of local capabilities Egypt says it wants to build, rather than simply expanding Chinese companies’ production and commercial networks in the country. The scale of Chinese investment in Egypt is growing, but it does not necessarily localize capacities in Egypt. Ain Sokhna, for example, has become a major base for Chinese manufacturing in Egypt. The China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone, established in 2008 by the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA) of China’s Tianjin Municipality, has since expanded alongside the wider Suez Canal Economic Zone. Chinese companies there produce fiberglass, electrical equipment, textiles, solar components and other industrial goods. By the end of 2025, the TEDA zone hosted nearly 200 companies, with more than $3.8 billion in investment and around 10,000 jobs created, with Xinhua, China’s state news agency, describing it as more than a source of employment for many Egyptians, calling it a “gateway to modernity” in their hometowns. But in a recent report, the British liberal journal, The Economist, examined the rapid expansion of Chinese manufacturing around Ain Sokhna, noting that Chinese manufacturers are increasingly bringing their suppliers with them when they expand overseas, creating deep, China-linked production networks in host economies. With no major new deals publicly announced ahead of the visit, the focus is mainly on what Egypt can gain from the relationship beyond attracting investment. Whether Xi’s visit will help turn that ambition into concrete commitments is now being closely watched. Navigating limits while building tech and security cooperation But the room for maneuver is becoming more complicated as US-Chinese rivalry heightens, with Egypt becoming another test case for the dynamic playing out across the region. The challenge is to maintain partnerships with both, while navigating the competition between the two. Just days before Xi’s visit, the government’s attempt to build out artificial intelligence capacity emerged as a new front in the US-China technology war, with Bloomberg revealing a Huawei bid on a government-issued tender to build AI data centers. The company proposed putting forward 1,408 of its top-end Ascend 950-series chips for an AI training cloud, plus another 600 chips for two inference clusters — infrastructure Huawei committed to execute in just 12 months, according to Bloomberg. The proposal prompted Washington to consider a rival offer, with the US State Department reaching out to Nvidia, AMD and Microsoft about assembling a consortium to compete with Huawei, according to Bloomberg. For Egypt, again, the question is not simply which technology it buys, but how much control and flexibility it retains over the systems it builds around it. Khaled al-Attar, a former deputy communications minister involved in Egypt’s digital transformation portfolio, said to Mada Masr that AI technology acquisition should be treated as a national-security issue and that diversification between technology providers is essential to digital sovereignty. That does not mean treating Chinese technology as a straightforward substitute for Western systems. Attar cautioned that Chinese technology ecosystems can be relatively closed, with differences in applications, tools and protocols potentially making integration with existing US and Western systems more difficult. In the same way, Egypt has been required to obtain US approval to import advanced American AI chips since 2023, while the US has threatened sanctions on countries importing Huawei accelerators. The shift toward Chinese technology could nevertheless be “a positive step” for diversification and sovereignty, Attar said, describing the current US-dominated model as “hegemonic” in character, while the Chinese model is “closed.” The challenge for Egypt is to be able to work with and integrate the technology, rather than simply procure it. The pressure is playing out in another sensitive sphere as well. As Xi meets Sisi in Cairo, Egyptian and Chinese air forces are conducting their second large-scale joint exercise, involving China’s J-16 fighters alongside Egypt’s French-made Rafales. Song Zhongping, a Chinese military commentator and a former Chinese People’s Liberation Army instructor, told the South China Morning Post that the J-16 deployment reflected Beijing’s efforts to train its air force to operate in unfamiliar environments and under different conditions. Observers said the deployment, the aircraft’s first to Africa, marks a remarkable expansion from 2025, when the first joint military exercise was held and China deployed its air-force package to Africa for joint training for the first time, including J-10C fighter jets. The US currently provides $1.3 billion per year in defense aid to Egypt, sponsoring the purchase of US-manufactured defense equipment. Hefny said that defense is one of the areas where he sees room for deeper cooperation between Egypt and China, pointing out that Egypt hopes to produce some of its own defense needs, with China as another source of defense technology and experience. But the joint exercises, in his framing, are not about choosing China over the US. He said Egypt conducts exercises with the US, European countries, Gulf states and Asian countries in order to expose its armed forces to different technologies and military practices. Finding a balance For Egypt, according to the former officials who spoke to Mada Masr, the challenge is always to balance its relationships. Limitations in the room for maneuver became clearer just days before Xi’s arrival, as the US moved against Banque Misr’s Emirati branch over its alleged dealings with Iran. Banque Misr has been one of the Egyptian institutions to benefit from financial support from Chinese banks. The step underscores the financial pressure Egypt could face as it maintains relationships with countries at odds with Washington. Hegazy stressed that “the warm Egyptian reception of the Chinese president should not be interpreted as a tilt toward Beijing at Washington’s expense.” “Egyptian-Chinese relations have evolved over seven decades to reach the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership, while Cairo has simultaneously remained committed to maintaining its relations and strategic partnerships with the US and other international powers,” the diplomat explained. Nevertheless, the visit constitutes a genuine test of Egypt’s ability to preserve this balance. The turn toward China at the beginning of Sisi’s leadership initially emerged as part of an effort to diversify Egypt’s economic, technological and strategic partnerships. Xi welcomed Sisi to Beijing in December 2014, just months after the military ouster of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi and as relations with Washington deteriorated. The two sides then established a clear exchange of political support for their new comprehensive strategic partnership, with China affirming Egypt’s right to independently choose its political system and development path, while Egypt reaffirmed the One China principle, including Beijing’s position on Taiwan. Sisi heralded the renewal of the commitment in an op-ed for the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper, writing that “Egypt has adhered to a policy of strategic balance as a guiding principle of its foreign policy at a time of growing polarization and competition, while affirming its independent foreign policy and calling for greater international coordination to address global challenges that now threaten the world as a whole.” “Egypt and China have become partners in strengthening the role of the Global South in the international system in ways that promote greater fairness and equity for developing countries,” Sisi wrote. Hegazy commented further.“The concept of ‘strategic balance’ provides perhaps the clearest framework for understanding the significance of this visit,” he explained, saying it “represents one of the fundamental pillars of Egyptian foreign policy, which is based on building balanced relations with various international powers, without viewing partnership with China as an alternative to relations with the US or any other major actor.” Ultimately, Egypt’s success in managing this equation will be measured by its ability to reconcile three interconnected objectives: building a strong and effective partnership with China, maintaining a stable and balanced relationship with the US and preserving the independence of Egyptian decision-making in a manner that safeguards and advances national interests, he concluded. Hefny, too, stressed that Egypt’s development agenda remains the central consideration, adding: “We are obliged to carry on with our development schemes in such a way that could uplift the standard of living of our people.” In the short-term, for Cairenes, the preparations for the Chinese president’s visit have included heightened security and traffic disruptions, with temporary traffic diversions on several main roads announced for Tuesday and Wednesday. Also pegged to the visit, the Cairo Governorate’s Roads and Transport Directorate launched a round of repair and maintenance works with the state-owned Arab Contractors to upgrade several bridges across the capital, including October 6 Bridge and other bridges leading to and from Cairo’s airport. The choreography extended beyond the streets, with a Chinese state-media mutli-lingual production on “Xi Jinping’s favorite literary allusions” that will be airing in Arabic on several Egyptian media outlets. Hefny said that the aim is for Egypt to learn from China’s development experience. Cairo is “trying to emulate China” and make “the best use of whatever has been accumulated as expertise and experiences on the Chinese side,” he explained. Overall, “the idea is not to lessen or reduce our dependence on the US. We don’t depend on the US, we depend on all our partners,” he continued, adding that “We cherish our partnerships, some of which are strategic partnerships, and one of them is comprehensive partnership, which is China.” The post As streets close to welcome Xi, Egypt seeks space for strategic aims during China visit first appeared on Mada Masr.
