In the crowded academy of autocrats, Bashar “the butcher” al-Assad has for the past decade been the dunce in the corner. Not because of the horrendous death toll under the Syrian leader’s command — half a million before NGOs stopped counting — but because he has emerged from all that slaughter ruling a dismembered and dysfunctional state.

Russia, Iran, Turkey and the United States grabbed zones of influence and stationed soldiers and spooks on the ground. What kind of feeble dictator lets that happen? Lets Russia control its airspace? Allows Israel to mount bombing raids on Syrian-hosted Iranian bases?

Now, though, after 12 years of bloodshed, Assad’s star is rising again in the authoritarian club. He might be writing a textbook called How to Survive Your Own Dictatorship. The Arab League has allowed Assad back into the fold. President Xi, the Chinese leader, has just welcomed him to Beijing and signed up to a nebulous Chinese-Syrian “strategic partnership”. There is talk of reserving Assad a seat at the Cop28 climate conference to be hosted in November by his new friend, the United Arab Emirates.

In part, this outreach is down to the shattering earthquakes last winter in northern Syria and southern Turkey. Syrians were killed not only in Syria but also in Turkey, where many had fled from bombed-out Aleppo. This miserable continuum between war deaths and natural disaster fatalities may have pricked the consciences of the 22-member Arab League. The calculation was also cynical: the earthquakes exposed how poorly the withered Syrian state was coping with its millions of displaced people, and highlighted the lucrative potential for a massive rebuilding programme.Most of all, though, Assad’s neighbours, protectors and kindred spirits prize the fact that he has hung on by his fingernails, defying western sanctions. The opposition was jailed, tortured and exiled while Assad’s palace would periodically release smiley family portraits with his London-born wife, Asma, and their serious-looking children. Nothing quite beats survivability for recovering the respect of fellow dictators.Syria was for years ripe for a coup, steered according to western intelligence forecasts by Assad’s even more ruthless brother Maher. But Assad, though a feckless manager of the economy, maintained discipline at court and inside the security apparat.More, he has started to fancy himself a geopolitical thinker. When Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, and President Biden announced an India-Middle East-Europe transport corridor at the last G20 summit, Beijing was concerned. The rail and shipping route would include fibre optics and clean hydrogen pipelines extending from India through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel and on to the European Union. A rival, in other words, to China’s Belt and Road initiative, which Syria formally joined last year. Could not Syria be part of a Chinese-led retort to this western push, one of Beijing’s more trusted Middle East allies?Xi has become accustomed to dictators turning up at his doorstep — the Venezuelan and Iranian leaders have dropped by this year — hoping to reap rewards by presenting themselves as victims of US financial warfare. Last week Assad became the supplicant, and it’s not clear yet whether he will persuade Xi to bankroll a Syrian renaissance.Reports suggest that Xi is cautious about aligning too closely with Assad. Although President Putin is distracted by his war on Ukraine, Russia remains Assad’s primary ally. Syria probably looks to Moscow like a money pit, its infrastructure wrecked, its housing needs bottomless. Assad can deliver the miracle recovery that he promises Xi and Putin only if he can make an attractive offer to the millions in the diaspora to return to the motherland and become a young, motivated labour force. That, in turn, hinges on a credible programme of modernisation and political reform and, as far as investors are concerned, an end to the systemic corruption that begins at the top, with Assad’s extended family.Xi must know that he would regret helping Assad out of his hole. Solidarity among dictators is costly — see his “limitless” friendship with Putin. But there is a clinching argument in favour of avoiding Assad like the plague: to maintain cash flows to the family and the elite, he has let the husk of his once proud country become a narco-state.Captagon, a synthetic party drug known as the poor man’s cocaine, is produced in huge quantities in regime-held Syria and Lebanon. Independent researchers say it goes in tablet form to customers in Saudi Arabia and Jordan but has spread across the region. Members of the Assad clan are said to get a slice of the annual $2 billion profits.The Chinese authorities have had plenty of dealings with corrupt governments. Deals struck in and around the Belt and Road initiative have allegedly been oiled with payoffs. But a strategic partner, as Syria has now become, that makes cash out of the drug trade won’t go down well with Xi. His political credo is that China has to shed the humiliation inflicted on it by the imperial powers, above all the opium trade run by British companies. Britain’s seizure of forts, its capture of ports, the opium wars of the 1840s, the addiction of Chinese youths — all make Xi wary of commercial relationships with narco-states.The rehabilitation of the Assads is advancing too fast, without any accountability for their crimes, for the barrel bombs rolled on to bread queues, for the chemical gas attacks and the flattening of schools. Think again, Xi. Assad is not a charity case.