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The case study demonstrates that China and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (KSA) energy transformation strategies share many similarities and enjoy a great degree of complementarity. This complementarity is not limited to the territory of the two nations, but has become a successful vehicle for joint Sino-KSA investments in the Arab peninsula as well as in the Middle East and North Africa. Leading to a new paradigm that runs along the lines of China’s staggering Belt and Road Initiative, the convergence of policies represents a new reality due to its potentiality to influence not only the energy sectors of the largest Arab’s economy and world’s most powerful one, but also over their partners.

In as much as it is contested, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is also unexplored, underdiscussed, and, as a result, misunderstood. Frequently viewed through the lens of international relations and global economy, the diverse dimensions of collaboration, including business and research-industry clusters, that BRI enhances, tend to be excluded from the analysis. In a similar manner, the role of the Arab Peninsula in the grand strategy underpinning BRI and its implementation is rarely discussed. BRI is a forward-oriented initiative, an attempt to reap benefits of developments and circumstances that are only nascent. This bears two potent implications. First, as China attempts to influence the context in which it operates, it is subject to change itself; the Chinese business sector evolution attests to that. Second, some of China’s not so obvious partners of today, including those in the Arab Peninsula, are about to turn into key interlocutors of tomorrow. BRI taps into opportunities thus created. This chapter elaborates on these issues and, against this backdrop, outlines how the remaining chapters included in this volume add to this discussion.