“Egypt has always loved megaprojects,” Mohamed el-Dahshan, a fellow at Chatham House and founder of international development company OXCAN, told Al Jazeera.

Speaking about the rush of projects, he added: “The government has sort of been building alliances through signing certain economic deals with various countries over the last few years.”

There is no shortage of projects to go around.

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) in January between German engineering company Siemens and the Egyptian government for the construction of a $23bn high-speed electric train is one. So too is the construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant, currently under way in the Mediterranean coastal city of El Dabaa, headed by the Russian state nuclear firm, Rosatom.1

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The Chinese State Construction and Engineering Company (CSCEC) is at work building the Central Business District of Egypt’s New Administrative Capital.

Chinese banks are financing roughly 85 percent of the $3bn project, which includes 20 towers, one of which, when completed at 385 metres (1,263 feet) tall, will be the highest building in Africa.

“Egypt is the hub of China’s Middle Eastern policy, particularly in politics and economy,” Degang Sun, a professor of international studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, told Al Jazeera in a statement.

“The size of Egypt’s market is surely attractive to China. Meanwhile, the relative stability and welcoming investment environment for international partners makes Egypt an essential investment destination for China,” Chuchu Zhang, deputy director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Fudan University, said in an email exchange.

At the political level, Chinese and Egyptian ties go back a long way.2

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• 1. Even Egypt’s archaeological treasures are caught up in the boom. The international Belgian construction firm Besix is in a joint partnership with an Egyptian company in building the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, which will be the largest museum in the world when it opens later this year.
• 2. Under nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt was the first Middle Eastern and African country to recognise the People’s Republic of China in 1956. Former President Hosni Mubarak was one of the first foreign leaders to visit Beijing after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Those historic relations have been nurtured under current President el-Sisi. He has made six trips to Beijing since becoming president in 2014 after a coup that overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi.