• Pakistan’s “Kung Fu Shoe King”

    I rarely have a chance to write Pakistan, so here’s a great story about a Chinese trader who set-up shop in Karachi and has made good money. He tells a familiar tale that could be the same for thousands of other traders. Chen Zejian is a 29-year old originally from Anhui province…

  • Light rail. Heavy losses.

    China Railway Construction Company has taken a $630 million loss on its light rail project in Mecca. The project links holy sites around Mecca and has a capacity of 90,000 passengers an hour. It had attracted considerable attention from the international media, as evidence of China’s strengthening relations with Saudi Arabia. So the loss has [...]

  • Doing it tough in Basra: Part 1

    A local paper from China’s Zhejiang province has published an article about Chinese traders in southern Iraq. It’s long, so I’ll look at the details over two posts. But the experiences of these traders say a lot more than can be gleamed from the trade data itself…

  • Calling all Arabic speakers

    Yiwu is a pin-up for China’s relations with the Middle East. It featured heavily in my book, and the Chinese coastal city continues to amaze visitors with its vast malls. So here’s an update. I earlier wrote about the upcoming China-Arab Trade Forum due to be held in Ningxia province late September. The website looks…

 

Recent Articles

Sun, sand, and sea

Middle East tourist arrivals to Asia have been on the rise in recent year, and I’ve finally managed to aggregate the data from various national sources.

Here’s the results (and a few surprises).

The number of visitors to the region have surged since 2000, from around 600,000 to over 1.6 million visitors annually. The increases owes in part to the challenges of traveling to the West after 2001, and the surge in oil prices after 2004.

Walkie-talkie diplomacy

It’s not recent news. But the fact the Chinese Embassy in Syria provided 10 walkie-talkies to the Arab League’s observer mission to Syria in early January is worth a mention.

The anecdote was quoted in a confidential report written by the mission’s head and acquired by a columnist for Foreign Policy, a respected magazine on global affairs. (That said, the report comes with a small health warning, as I can’t find independent confirmation of its contents).

Not your usual advertisement

A remarkable video. It shows two Chinese traders in Iraq who have sponsored a Shiite ‘mawkib’ or religious procession. The black banner at the start of the video advertises that the procession is sponsored by the People’s Republic of China.

The older trader, when asked why he sponsored the service, talks of common dreams or aspirations. The younger trader (Mr Khalid) translates.

Iran jitters. But Iraq and Angola show bigger changes.

There’s been speculation that China has cut its oil imports from Iran during the past month owing to a pricing dispute. This comes on the back of a U.S decision to impose sanction on foreign banks dealing with Iran’s central bank.

With that in mind, I’ve updated China’s oil import data for the past month. The graph shows only a modest change in the composition of China’s oil imports from its Middle East suppliers throughout the Arab spring.

From fake viagra, to fake pound coins

More fakes. It used to be that Egypt was flooded by fake-Viagra. Not so much anymore: now, it’s fake-Egyptian pound coins. The common thread is that both are made in China.

Egypt’s Youm Al Saba’a reported last year that the coins are entering the country hidden in shipping container full of toys. Apparently, the number of containers makes proper inspection difficult. There’s also the risk of damaging the toys.

China’s “constructive participation” in the Middle East

I’ve argued for some time that China will find it more difficult to apply its policy of “non-intervention” in the Middle East compared to other parts of the world. It appears there are others who agree with this view.

Dr Liu Kang is a Middle East expert and Head of the Humanities Department at the highly-rated Shanghai Jiaotong University. He was also formerly at Duke University. Liu was recently interviewed by the Guangzhou-based Nanfeng Chuang magazine and has some insightful comments.

Who from the Silk Road is visiting the U.S.?

I’ve been updating U.S. visa statistics for an article in the French journal Etudes. It’s been a few years since I have looked at the figures. They make for interesting reading.

First, non-immigrant visas issued to Middle East nationals are still below their 2000 levels, or pre-September 11. Sure, they are not far below, at 252,000 versus 275,000, but that’s still remarkable given that the Middle East’s economy has tripled in size during the same period (in current $ figures).

What an A380 says about the Silk Road

One of the frustrating ironies of the blog is the more I travel, the more I observe, but the harder it is finding time to write

The past month has been especially relentless–Bahrain, Riyadh, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou–at least, that’s my excuse for the absence of posts.

I have though managed to collect a few A380 stories that help illustrate the region’s growth.