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Xi opens three days in Egypt
September 2, 2026
Xi Jinping is in Egypt for three days, his first visit in a decade, with talks with President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi scheduled for Wednesday.
AP News reports that Xi Jinping is in Egypt for three days, that the leaders are scheduled to hold talks on Wednesday, and that Xi plans to visit the Grand Egyptian Museum near the pyramids of Giza. The same account sets the visit against a longer commercial record: China has invested more than $10 billion in Egypt, building a business hub east of Cairo and an electric rail line for industry in the Nile Delta, and Egypt signed agreements with China to collaborate on the Belt and Road Initiative. Bloomberg, The New York Times and Al Jazeera carry the visit on the same terms, Bloomberg framing the decade since Xi was last in Cairo as one that changed the region, The New York Times casting the trip as a test of American influence in the Middle East, and Al Jazeera placing it against regional turmoil. On the substance the four agree, and no figure or date in the account is in dispute.
The strategic reading is corroborated across AP News, Bloomberg, The New York Times and Al Jazeera. Egypt was invited in 2023 to join the BRICS bloc, seen as a counterbalance to Western-led institutions such as the G7. In August, China and Egypt held a multiday air exercise at several bases across Egypt, the first combat exercise for China's J-16 fighter jets and Egypt's French-made Rafale fighters. Xi arrives in Cairo after a two-day conference of the 10-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization, billed as a counterweight to U.S. global influence. AP News and Al Jazeera both carry the line that leaders of China, Russia and India are among the heads of state meeting to counter US influence.
What gives the trip its weight is the Suez Canal. With oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz heavily disrupted by the Iran war, the canal Egypt controls has become an important alternative path for energy leaving the region, and Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat of Jakarta's Center of Economic and Law Studies told AP News that “China has good reason to strengthen ties with the country that controls the route still open.” The counterweight is American: trade between the U.S. and Egypt was $15.7 billion in 2025, and Egypt remains a partner in U.S. national security priorities in the region. Settled: the itinerary, the investment figures, the trade figure, the August air exercise, and the 70 years of diplomatic ties the two governments marked with opinion pieces in Egypt's state-run newspapers. Unsettled: what either government takes away from Wednesday.
Still developing
The meeting between Xi and el-Sissi carries the same way in every account, and nothing in the record as of the draft cuts against it.
How settled the reporting is
Sources
- AP News — Xi visits Egypt as China seeks deeper influence across the Mideast
- Al Jazeera — China’s Xi makes first visit to Egypt in a decade, amid regional turmoil