The Saudi royal house prides itself as the guardian of the Muslim faith, and seeks to ensure that daily life on the Arabian Peninsula is dominated by Islamic practices. The two holiest sites of Islam — Mecca and Medina — are under its care, and it welcomes, in non-COVID times, millions of Hajis — Muslim pilgrims from all over the world — to these cities each year.   

In other words, the keepers of the keys to the Kaaba — Islam’s most sacred shrine — aspire to play the same role in the Islamic faith as the Vatican does in the Catholic one.

One would think that the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Riyadh, which took place in December, would have provided an opportunity for the Saudis to bring up China’s brutal mistreatment of its Muslim minorities.  But, despite signing cooperation agreements with China on almost everything imaginable, the Uyghurs apparently went unmentioned.

Instead, the press was full of feel-good stories about how Xi had brought rain to Riyadh and how the Arab world was flocking to learn the Chinese language.

To be fair, the Vatican has not been exactly heroic in standing up for Catholics in China either.

But then the slow-rolling destruction of the Christian faith in China has not been accompanied by mass incarceration, involuntary servitude, sterilization and abortion campaigns, and forced organ transplantation.

As readers of these pages know, every one of these things is happening to the Uyghurs in their historic homeland in China’s Far West. Uyghur men are locked up in labor camps in large numbers, while younger Uyghurs of both sexes are sold to coastal factories in conditions resembling slave labor.  

Uyghur women are being sterilized, their unborn babies aborted—the authorities think they have too many children—while those Uyghur children who are born are often sent to boarding schools to be Sinicized.  That is to say, raised to think of themselves as Chinese.

Perhaps the worst crime of this long litany of abuse is forced organ harvesting.  This involves the killing of prisoners for their organs, which are then sold to those, often foreigners, who are willing to pay a premium for a new heart, lung, or kidney.   

The huge Uyghur prison population almost guarantees that a tissue match can be found for prospective buyers among their number.  Not to mention that their organs are particularly prized by Middle Easterners because their former owners followed a Halal diet, meaning that their organs are also “Halal.”  

All of this is to say that what is happening in the Uyghur homeland is not just discrimination or persecution, although there is plenty of that as well.  It is, rather, full-on genocide, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared on January 19, 2020.

So what would be so important to the Saudis that they would abandon their fellow Muslims and embrace the Communist leader with open arms?  

While China has a major thirst for Saudi oil, the sheiks are not equally desperate to sell it. As they clamor to keep demand at its most optimal — and lucrative — the Saudis sit on huge pools of black gold with firm control of the spigot. They have even turned customers away, as they did prior to the midterms when Biden asked Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to hike production.  All he got out of the exchange was a fist bump.

China has repeatedly asked to pay for oil purchases in Chinese yuan, but Saudi Arabia has so far refused to go along, continuing to insist on payment in “petrodollars.” The Saudis, in return for U.S. security guarantees, long ago agreed to protect the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

But that may be about to change.

In a Riyadh speech, Xi Jinping himself revealed the outlines of the deal he was offering the Saudis. There were, he said, two areas that should be given “priority”.  The first was transitioning to the use of Chinese currency in all oil and gas purchases by China from Arab League countries.  The second was bringing Chinese nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

Over the years, the Saudis have repeatedly asked the U.S. to share its nuclear technology, but have been refused. Now the Chinese are stepping in to offer theirs.

Of course, both Beijing and Riyadh will insist that this technology will only be used for peaceful purposes, such as powering the country’s electric grid.  But it should be obvious that the Saudi oil barons have absolutely no need for nuclear power plants — or windmills, or solar panels, or anything else — to power, well, anything.  In the desert kingdom, gas is literally cheaper than water.  

What other use would the Saudis have for nuclear technology than to build breeder reactors to produce fissionable material for nuclear weapons?

In truth, the Saudis may feel they have no choice. After all, their bitter sectarian enemies, the Iranian mullahs, will soon have nuclear weapons themselves. Despite the ongoing protests across Iran, Biden himself has admitted that his efforts to entice the mullahs in back into the 2015 nuclear deal are “dead.” 

At the root of Xi’s success in Riyadh are Biden’s failures, which are leading U.S. allies in the region to look elsewhere for support in an increasingly chaotic world — even from the Chinese as they torture fellow muslims.

Steven Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.