Китайский «Один пояс, один путь» в арабских странах северной и восточной Африки

In January 2016, China and Egypt signed a five-year outline document in which the two sides vowed to "double their efforts" to develop the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone. It covers an area of 6 km, located some 120 km to the east of Cairo near the Suez Canal, and is only about 50 km away from Egypt's new adminis-trative capital, where the BRI and Egypt's Suez Ca-nal Corridor Development Project meet. The pro-ject was to attract more than 100 textile, clothing, oil, motorcycle and solar energy enterprises to Egypt. For over a decade, it has directly offered jobs to over 3,500 people and created 30,000 job opportunities through the industries it gathered. The program has managed to attract invest-ments from the world's top companies [119]. The special market zone was home to more than 30 Chinese en-terprises [68]. “TEDA Fun Valley”3 in the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone is also one of the main cooperation programs and attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. In addition to a cluster of industrial enterprises, the cooperation zone will be transformed into a city with many ancil-lary facilities such as restaurants and super-markets, as well as commercial residential areas and a shop-ping center [119]. In August 2018, Egypt officially opened its “New Suez Canal” [118].

In 2008, COSCO4 Pacific, China’s largest ship-ping state-owned enterprises (SOE), invested US $ 185.6 million in a joint venture to operate and manage the Suez Canal Container Terminal (SCCT) in Port Said East Port, located in the western Sinai Peninsula at the northern end of the Canal [23, p. 63]. For Port Said East Port’s second development phase, operating since 2012, China's largest state-owned enterprises and the second largest dredging company in the world - China Harbor Engineering Company (CHEC) invested US $ 219 million to con-struct a 1,200-meter quay. CHEC also completed a contract valued at US $ 1 billion to construct a quay in al-Adabiya port at the southern entrance to the Canal [59, p. 11] 5. In May 2018, Egypt's New Urban Communi-ties Authority (NUCA) signed a MoU with Chinese construction company CGCOC Group (formerly known as CGC Overseas Construction Group Co., Ltd) to establish the first industrial zone in the city of New Alamein. CHEC started in August 2018, the main phase of the construction of a new terminal basin in Sokhna Port south of the Suez Canal north-east of Egypt, while the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) signed in September a loan agreement of US $ 600 million with the China Development Bank (CDB) in Beijing [121].

In 2017, Egypt signed a preliminary agree-ment with China Fortune Land Development for US $ 10 billions of investments over a period of 10 years for development works at the new adminis-trative capital, located 40 km east of Greater Cairo, between Cairo and the Suez Canal. Once completed, the city is expected to accommodate around 5 mil-lion inhabitants [35, p. 22; 56]. The plan for the new capital, where most of the Egyptian govern-ment will relocate upon completion, could exceed US $ 20 billion, and the China State Construction and Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) has begun const-ruction of a US $ 3 billion new business and administrative district, mostly funded by Chinese banks. Other Chinese companies are actively en-gaging with Egyptian authorities on other aspects of the multibillion-dollar project to build a new de-sert capital [19].

Chinese drilling company ZPEC has 11 rigs in Egypt and it plans to bring more of them to join the Canal Sugar project. Since 2016, ZPEC has worked in Egypt's 1.5-million-feddan reclamation national project and drilled 38 agricultural wells for the Egyptian military in the Sinai Peninsula. At the end of 2018, ZPEC deployed three 650 horsepower 40-meter rigs and other heavy equipment in various locations in the desert, about 50 km west of the Mallawi area in Minya (Western Desert near the southern Egyptian province of Minya) [64].

In March 2018, the Egyptian government signed a MoU with China State Construction Engineering Co. on designing and const-ructing three closed gymnasiums in Sharm al-Sheikh, Hurghada and Luxor in preparation for hosting the 2021 World Men's Handball Championship. In September 2018, Egypt and China signed deals, including the construction of a pumping and storage station in the Mount Ataka area in Northeast Egypt, a coal-fired power station in Hamrawein on the Red Sea coast and the second phase of central business dis-trict in the new administrative capital. The signings also included building a textile industrial project, a refinery and a petro-chemicals complex in the Suez Canal corridor area. In December 2018, Egypt's Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI) announ-ced on the agreement with China Railway 20 Bureau Group Corpo-ration (CR20G) to establish an industrial facility to manufacture mon-orails and express trains. Also in December, Egyp-tian Air Forces signed an agreement during EDEX 2018 exhibition in Cairo to purchase drones from China's National Aero-Technology Import and Ex-port Corporation (CATIC) [121].

In August 2018, Chinese fiberglass giant manufacturer Jushi, which was introduced to Egypt via the cooperation zone, completed the produc-tion base of 200,000 tons of fiberglass by its local branch, making Egypt the world's fifth largest fi-berglass producer [119]. The natural resources discovered in Egyptian Zohr offshore gas field are increasing the opportunities to develop further partnerships in buil-ding offshore facilities within the MSR platform and granting new chances for China in the energy sector [75].

The large natural gas reserves discovered in Egypt in the late 1990s allowed it to become one of the leaders in the production of this type of hydrocar-bon, not only in the ME, but all over the world [12, p. 157; 25, p. 309]. As a fuel importer, China has been cooperating with Egypt since 1993 in the gas and heavy oil sectors to increase the efficiency of technol-ogies used in old oil wells and to develop equipment for the petrochemical industry [52, p. 14].