On July 28, 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his Mauritanian counterpart, President Mohamed Ould Cheikh Ghazouani, in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Xi’s meeting with Ghazouani was his second in the space of eight months, as the two leaders had met at the China-Arab States Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 9, 2022. After the meeting, China signed a cooperation agreement, which spanned the agriculture, fisheries, and green energy sectors, and granted $21 million in debt relief to Mauritania.
Xi’s meeting with Ghazouani was seemingly routine in nature; Mauritania joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2018. But the timing of China’s courtship of Mauritania was striking. It occurred just hours after Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani staged a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum in Niger. And it was followed by German Development Minister Svenja Schulze’s Aug. 14 visit to a United Nations refugee agency in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott. Schulze’s visit was a tacit acknowledgement of how Mauritania, a country of 4.6 million people, had accepted up to 100,000 refugees from neighboring countries.
These meetings underscore Mauritania’s status as the sole bastion
