Chinese leader Xi Jinping is attending a pair of regional summits in Saudi Arabia this week amid efforts to kick-start economic growth weighed down by strict anti-COVID-19 measures.
The Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Xi will attend the inaugural China-Arab States Summit and a meeting with leaders of the six nations that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
His state visit to Saudi Arabia will end on Saturday.
Xi's attendance at the China-Arab States Summit marks the “largest and highest-level diplomatic event between China and the Arab world since the founding of the People's Republic of China and will become an epoch-making milestone in the history of China-Arab relations," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters at a daily briefing on Wednesday.
Mao said China hopes the summit will set a future agenda for relations between the sides and “help build more strategic common understandings on major regional and international issues ... And defend multilateralism."
The last was an apparent reference to China's efforts to challenge the US-dominated international order that has seen Beijing find common cause with Russia, Iran and other states hostile to Washington.
Xi's visit underscores China's role as the world's second-largest economy and a major source of outward investment, lately under the rubric of Xi's signature “Belt and Road Initiative" and the more recent “Global Development Initiative."
Those programs aim to have Chinese companies build and finance roads, power stations, ports and other infrastructure across Asia and beyond, vastly increasingly Beijing's influence in the developing world.
So far, they've met with only limited success, amid accusations that many of the projects are impracticable, overpriced and unaffordable to the mostly poor nations taking them on.
To fuel China's massive demand, the country imports half of its oil. Fully half of those imports come from Saudi Arabia, amounting to tens of billions of dollars annually.
China's economic growth had been on a steady decline for years and was dealt a major blow by rolling lockdowns imposed across the country as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinese economic growth rebounded to 3.9 per cent over a year earlier in the three months ending in September, up from the first half of the year's 2.2 per cent, but still well short of the government target.