Bianca Pasquier and Leonardo Bruni
On November 12, 2025, the Chinese embassy in Tripoli officially reopened after more than a decade. However, the return of Chinese diplomatic staff to the Libyan capital passed largely unnoticed, attracting scant media interest both domestically and abroad. Most of the international coverage came from Italy, where the news outlet Formiche interviewed ChinaMed’s Head of Research, Andrea Ghiselli, on the matter.
According to Ghiselli, the reopening of the embassy in Tripoli may be linked to Beijing’s plans to restore its diplomatic mission in Syria later this year. Taken together, he argued, these moves suggest an effort by China to reintroduce a degree of “normalcy” into two long-standing Mediterranean dossiers. From this perspective, the unshuttering of the Chinese embassy in Tripoli may signal an attempt by Beijing to expand its diplomatic room for maneuver across the region.
Ghiselli is careful, however, to draw a distinction. While Syria has succeeded in achieving a measure of territorial consolidation, international recognition and investment commitments under the leadership of Ahmed al-Sharaa, Libya, by contrast, remains deeply fragmented. The country is divided between the United Nations-recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) based in Tripoli in the west, and the de facto authority of military strongman Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) in the east.
Still, the Syrian comparison is useful. As in Syria, China’s role in Libya has often been overstated, swinging between inflated expectations and undue suspicion. This edition of the ChinaMed Observer therefore revisits the past decade of Chinese engagement in Libya, tracing Beijing’s evolving relations with the country’s factions and situating them within a regional context. We explore whether dynamics reminiscent of the end of the Syrian civil war are beginning to emerge in Libya, and whether such parallels can shed light on Beijing’s future approach to the Libyan crisis.
Our assessment aligns with Ghiselli’s argument: the reopening of the Chinese embassy signals normalization, but little beyond that. As the Syrian case shows, diplomatic engagement does not imply political commitment, let alone a readiness for direct involvement. China is thus unlikely to engage deeply in Libya’s power struggles. If anything, recent developments in Syria appear to be shaping Beijing’s approach to Libya, reinforcing a preference for caution, balance, and neutrality. This posture is all the more likely given that Libya today is not only unresolved but far more crowded with external actors than Syria ever was. In such an environment, Beijing will likely opt to keep its options open, present, but uncommitted.
China and the Beginning of the
Libyan Crisis
The Libyan crisis erupted in early 2011, when the Arab Spring swept in from neighboring Tunisia and Egypt, igniting mass protests against the long-entrenched rule of Muammar Gaddafi. What began as popular unrest quickly descended into a violent civil war, one that also upended foreign economic interests rooted in the country, notably those of China.
Before the conflict, Beijing was a major importer of Libyan oil, and Chinese state-owned enterprises were deeply involved in construction, energy, and infrastructure projects nationwide. However, an unintended risk of this mutually profitable partnership was that tens of thousands of Chinese nationals were on Libyan soil when war broke out. Their safety was an immediate concern for Beijing, which mounted an unprecedented response: in March 2011, China carried out its largest overseas evacuation, extracting more than 35,000 citizens from Libya, an active war zone thousands of kilometers from its borders.
China’s unprecedented response and ability to operate in the Mediterranean caught many European observers off guard (this episode spurred the creation of the ChinaMed Project later that same year). At the same time, the operation’s reliance on chartered civilian ships and aircraft laid bare the limits of China’s power-projection capabilities. As such, experts regard the Libya evacuation as having catalyzed Beijing’s subsequent push to modernize its military, establish its first overseas base in Djibouti, and refine its doctrine for “military operations other than war.”
Analysts like Jesse Marks also see Libya as the watershed moment in China’s approach to conflict resolution in the region. In March 2011, as violence spiraled out of control, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 that sanctioned the NATO-led intervention by authorizing a no-fly zone and “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. Despite its veto power and commitment to non-interference, China chose to abstain to avoid alienating the Arab League and the African Union which supported the resolution.
By ultimately toppling Gaddafi’s regime, however, the intervention contributed to plunging the country into prolonged political instability and a severe humanitarian crisis. In the aftermath, Beijing adopted a more skeptical posture toward Western-led interventions, doubling down on the primacy of state sovereignty and negotiated settlements.
This shift was most evident regarding Syria, where China repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions it believed could open the door to regime change. At the same time, China further prioritized cultivating ties with key regional actors and expanding its multilateral frameworks in the region not merely to insulate its relationships from future diplomatic divergences, but also to shape the contours of the regional debate itself.
China’s Stance on Libya’s Factions:
Cautious and Calculated Neutrality
Although China abstained from Resolution 1973, it was quick to criticize NATO airstrikes. This somewhat discongruous posture allowed Beijing to pursue what Sandy Alkoutami and Frederic Wehrey described as a strategy of “cautious” and “calculated” neutrality during the 2011 Libya war. In practice, China hedged its bets: preserving ties with Gaddafi’s collapsing regime while opening channels to the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC), which Beijing formally recognized as Libya’s sole legitimate authority in September 2011, following the fall of the capital Tripoli.
This ambiguity initially led to mistrust.
At first, the NTC viewed Beijing warily amid accusations that China had sought to skirt the arms embargo to supply Gaddafi. However, through sustained diplomatic outreach after the war, China managed to repair relations with Libya’s post-Gaddafi leadership. As Alkoutami and Wehrey note, these efforts not only helped restore China’s prewar economic footprint but also left Beijing in relatively good standing with successive UN-recognized, Tripoli-based governments.
Those governments, for their part, proved incapable of unifying the anti-Gaddafi camp. Rival factions hardened, Islamist groups expanded their reach, and state authority steadily fragmented. Against this backdrop, Khalifa Haftar and his LNA launched Operation Dignity in eastern Libya in May 2014, ostensibly to eliminate Islamist militias, but widely perceived as a bid for dominance.
In response, opposing Islamist militants and armed groups coalesced into the Libya Dawn coalition, leading to fighting erupting around Tripoli and across the east, plunging Libya into its second civil war.
Heavy foreign intervention quickly followed, unsurprising given the strategic prize of Libya’s vast oil reserves. Broadly speaking, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, France, and Russia supported the LNA, while Türkiye, Qatar, and Italy backed the UN-recognized authorities in Tripoli.
These states did not merely act through proxies; several intervened directly, deploying airpower, military advisers, and mercenaries. Türkiye’s role was especially consequential, tipping the balance against Haftar’s 2019 surprise offensive on Tripoli.
A UN-brokered ceasefire in October 2020 briefly raised hopes for national reconciliation and elections.
Those hopes have since faded, with any progress stalling amid disputes over electoral rules and candidate eligibility. The east-west divide between the GNU and LNA has only become more entrenched, with periodic and often intense clashes continuing to punctuate this uneasy stalemate.
Throughout this second civil war and its unresolved aftermath, Beijing has largely maintained its posture of neutrality and balancing. As in conflicts such as Yemen, China has consistently called for a political solution that preserves Libya’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, while condemning foreign interference.
Yet, for much of the past decade, many analysts have questioned if this neutrality has ever been truly even-handed. Samuel Ramani has argued that China tilted toward Tripoli-based governments over Haftar-aligned authorities in the east.
This tendency is consistent with Beijing’s longstanding preference for UN-recognized governments and is reflected in its sustained (though not exclusive) diplomatic engagement with the GNU and its predecessors.
Jalel Harchaoui argued that this preference is also motivated by economic concerns, (this reflects a broader tendency to view China’s Libya policy as “economy first” by default). Tripoli-based authorities control the highly contested Central Bank of Libya, the sole legal repository of the country’s oil revenues, granting the GNU the unique ability to disburse funds, sign contracts, and allocate capital.
When Chinese state-owned PetroChina signed an annual contract with Libya’s National Oil Corporation in May 2018, it necessarily relied on, and reinforced, the financial primacy of Tripoli.
Nor has the relationship been one-sided. Tripoli, for its part, has actively courted Chinese investments by joining the BRI in 2018. Since then, successive Tripoli-based governments have sought to market Libya as a destination for Chinese capital, not only in hydrocarbons, but also in infrastructure and telecommunications, pointing to firms such as Huawei and ZTE as possible partners.
This outreach has continued under the current government. In June 2024, at the inaugural Chinese-Libyan Economic Forum in Beijing, GNU Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah urged Chinese companies to restart suspended projects, explicitly casting Beijing as a central actor in Libya’s reconstruction.
China’s response has been cautious but noteworthy.
Bilateral trade has grown over the last few years and Chinese firms have signed on to restart frozen infrastructure projects (see graphs 4 and 5). The November 2023 memorandum of understanding between the Misrata Free Zone and China Harbour exemplifies growing Chinese interest in investing in GNU-controlled territory.
However, this deepening economic and diplomatic relationship has clear limits. Even as Beijing elevated ties with Tripoli to a “strategic partnership” during the visit to China of the (GNU-linked) Libyan Presidency Council head Mohammad al-Manfi, it has stopped short of translating the relationship into tangible security support – something Tripoli has sought.
As Harchaoui noted, Beijing has declined Tripoli’s requests to help lift the UN arms embargo or to assist it in accessing Libya’s frozen sovereign wealth fund.
This restraint speaks to both China’s reluctance to become entangled in Libya’s security quagmire and its determination not to foreclose options in the east. Beijing has consistently kept open channels with Haftar, hedging against the uncertain trajectory of the Libyan conflict and likely mindful that much of Libya’s oil infrastructure lies in LNA-controlled territory.
At the same time, recent developments have led to speculation that China may be leaning toward a more active role in Libya’s security landscape, and perhaps even beginning to tilt, cautiously, toward the LNA.
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China Global South Project
