With 5 million citizens to protect and billions of investment dollars at stake, China is rethinking its policy of keeping out of other countries' affairs.
China has long made loans conditional on contracts for its companies. In recent years it has sent an army of its nationals to work on pipelines, roads and dams in such hot spots as South Sudan, Yemen and Pakistan. Increasingly, it has to go across borders to protect or rescue them.
That makes it harder to stick to the policy espoused by then-Premier Zhou Enlai in 1955 of not interfering in "internal" matters, something that has seen China decline to back international sanctions against Russia over Ukraine or the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.