At least there are still some buyers out there. I notice that Taiwan is sending a trade mission to the Middle East in early May. (Yes, Asia’s exports to the Middle East are one of the few things still growing). A not small delegation of 62 Taiwanese companies will be visiting Jeddah, Riyadh, and Tehran. (The region’s largest consumer markets). But it isn’t just export dollars that Taiwan is interested in. It’s also tourist dollars. I was surfing cable channels the other night and stumbled across a Taiwanese cooking show that was explaining the importance of offering Halal food to Muslim tourists from the Middle East. So, it’s not just Hong Kong that is enjoying an influx of Middle Eastern tourists.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Singapore’s Lesson For Dubai
A lot has been written on Dubai in the past few months. Some are fans. Others are critics. But few offer an idea of what the city might look like in a decade from now.
I was in Singapore last week and was struck by the amount of construction taking place. The number of cranes on the skyline reminded me of Dubai. Now, Singapore has its problems. Its economy is contracting. Its construction sector is suffering. But this isn’t the first time the city took a hit. It was also shaken by the Asia crisis in 1997, and its experience then offers a way to think about Dubai’s future today.
Here’s the most important lesson. It’s the construction sector that will take the biggest hit. In 1997, Singapore experienced a Dubai-like boom in its property market. The resulting crash was spectacular and the construction sector has only just recovered. In fact, it was only last year that the country started spending as much money building residential apartments and shopping malls as it did during the mid-1990s.
East v. West
Song Hongbing believes the West is using its currency policy to prevent the East’s rise. His best-selling Chinese-language book, “Currency Wars”, is being read by senior officials across China. They are dipping into such chapters as “Financial Nuclear Bomb: Target Tokyo” and reading how the Plaza Accords, signed in 1985 between Japan and four Western nations, including the United States, contributed to the collapse in the Japanese economy.
Critics will argue that Song is only appealing to conspiracy theorists. Maybe so. But the number of people who believe in Song’s views is often larger then we might think.
I was reminded of this while watching Al Jazeera. Who should appear? That’s right. Song Hongbing. He was being interviewed by Ahmed Mansour the anchor of No Limits. (The program is Al Jazeera’s version of the BBC’s HardTalk). Here was a Chinese author speaking on an Arabic-language TV program to an audience in the Middle East about how the West’s currency policy has been used to suppress the East’s economies.
Your potential in-laws are also looking east as a result of the financial crisis
I’m not a big fan of using just economic data to explain the rise of the East. So, I was pleased to find these two articles today on marriage. It seems brides, not just investors, are also turning away from the west and looking east. First, is a survey by a Chinese matchmaking website (The Matchmaker), which shows the number of Chinese women planning to marry foreigners falling from 43% to 17% in the past year. The financial crisis was partly to blame for the fall as women worried about their partner’s “financial stability”.
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Hong Kong’s “Little Riyadh”
I was chatting with an Egyptian friend last week, a twenty-year resident of Hong Kong, and was struck by a remark she made: “I had lunch at the Shangri-La hotel last weekend, and the waiter showed me which dishes had pork and which dishes didn’t. It’s the first time that’s happened in twenty-years”.
The story is an example of Hong Kong’s free-market at its best. My friend wears a Hijab and is easily identified as a Muslim. In the past, the waiter might have overlooked this. But not anymore. Why? Because Muslim tourists are Hong Kong’s latest big spenders.
In fact, it’s now common to hear the Arab Gulf dialects spoken in Hong Kong’s air-conditioned malls. The number of Saudi Arabian tourists, for instance, has soared from a low 5,000 in 2000 to 19,000 in 2007. (The numbers have since dipped modestly as a result of the economic crisis).
What’s Syria up to in China’s central provinces of Hubei and Hunan?
Syria has strong links with a number of China’s coastal cities. But the central provinces?
I noticed an article last week advertising a Syrian Film Festival in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province. Now, Wuhan isn’t small―it has a population of 7 million. But it’s still almost a 2-flight from Beijing and an odd choice for a film festival. I can’t see the connection, although Wuhan University does have a decent Middle East studies department.
I’ve also since noticed that Mohammad Dawood Al Sattam, a member of the Syrian Baath Party Central Committee, visited Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, in late March. Hunan is a major agricultural hub and famous for exporting labor to the country’s coastal cities. But it’s a political backwater in all other respects. What’s the explanation? It might be because Al Sattam is governor of Al Hasakah, a relatively poor province in Syria’s northeast. He certainly was there on a study trip and had lots of praise for China’s economic reform.
The two stories are a great example of how you won’t always read about the rise of the new Silk Road in the Western media.
