Yemen's security challenge tests China's foreign policy

Libya's unrest shone a spotlight on China's growing foreign policy challenges. Within a few short weeks earlier this year, Beijing was forced to evacuate 35,000 Chinese nationals, even as Libya's oil exports, including those to China, were disrupted and international oil prices soared.

Still, this is not the China of old. And the country's navy quickly dispatched an armed frigate to participate in the evacuation, signalling China's growing assertiveness and willingness to be viewed as a military power so far away from home.

Yet if Libya offered insights into China's evolving foreign policy, then Yemen will seriously put it to the test.

Yemen poses a potentially much larger problem for China than did Libya. It might not appear so at first: after all, the country is among the poorest in the world, while its oil production accounts for a small, and declining, fraction of the world's total.

But it is Yemen's geography that makes the country so important - it is both a gatekeeper to one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and shares a border with the world's largest oil supplier.

The Bab al-Mandeb is a 30-kilometre stretch of water separating Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea at its narrowest. It is through this strait that 22,000 vessels, from container ships to oil tankers, pass annually as they travel between Asia and Europe.