I’ve finally tracked down a copy of Sun Bigan’s article that refers to unavoidable conflict between China and the United States in the Middle East. The article was published in the Chinese-language “Asia and Africa Review”. The quote was first referred to in an editorial by Lebanon’s Daily Star and, later, in article by Robert Fisk for the UK’s The Independent.
But the rest of the article makes for compelling reading. Sun is China’s former Special Envoy to the Middle East. He is also an Arabic speaker and former Chinese ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. Sun retired earlier this year and so enjoys greater freedom to speak his mind. And that makes him worth listening to.
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I earlier referred to a proposal by the Obama administration for Saudi Arabia to increase its oil exports to China in place of Iran’s exports, and thus reduce Iran’s leverage over China. The proposal has received some coverage in the Chinese media over the past week as the result of a Wall Street Journal article published on October 20. The report claims that the UAE has agreed to boost its oil exports to China significantly in the next three years. It also implies that Saudi Arabia is considering the same.
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I recently met with Mohammed, an Egyptian trader and a 20-year veteran of China. He studied Chinese in Ein Shams University in the early 1980s, before finally settling in China permanently. It was that or become a policeman. Mohammed made a few comments that are worth noting.
First, trade between China and the Middle East has yet to seriously recover from the economic crisis.
Second, Arab traders haven’t suffered from visa restrictions. This is an important point. The fact Arab traders have been able to apply successfully for visas to China, in contrast to Europe and the United States, is one reason why China’s trade with the Middle East has grown so rapidly.
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I’m reading James Yeager’s excellent report on China’s bid for the Aynak copper mine. Most importantly, the report’s starting point is the tendering process itself. Only later does it examine the reasons for China’s success. I find this extremely useful as it puts China’s bid into context. Too many reports assume China’s purchase of foreign commodity assets is inevitable, and then work backwards filling in the gaps.
There were a few points that I found particularly interesting.
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I expect to read a lot more about China’s presence in Afghanistan in the coming weeks. And it will be the type of discussion that gets politicians hot under the collar.
Geologist James Yeager, who served as an advisor to the Ministry of Mines in Afghanistan, will host a news conference on Thursday describing how a lack of interest from U.S. officials allowed China to gain a foothold in Afghanistan’s resource sector.
It’s a topic that was already attracting attention. I received a call from an NBC reporter in Kabul recently to talk about China’s $3.5 billion investment in the Aynak mine. Her report was due to air this week and will only help flag the issue.
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This Robert Fisk article has caught a lot of attention today. In the article, titled “The Demise of The Dollar”, he argues that the Gulf Arabs along with China, Russia, Japan, and France, are planning to end dollar-denominated oil contracts. And instead move to a basket of currencies.
The article first caught attention in Asia’s early morning trading and the dollar weakened as a result against the major currencies. It plays to longstanding fears that the dollar’s credibility as a global reserve currency is fading as a result of the economic crisis.
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Scrap that idea. I was recently in the United States, and was arguing for a need for policy to start thinking of China and the Middle East as the same policy challenge. What I learnt is that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.
It seems that the financial sector can look beyond geographical divides. But the military and political sectors are struggling. It’s perhaps not surprising. It’s easy enough to move an investment banker from Dubai to Beijing. Money is, after all, pretty much the same in any country.
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China’s policy towards its Muslim population is often misunderstood. The mistake lies in the assumption that the Uighur population, in Xinjiang, represents all Muslims in China. That simply isn’t true. The Uighur make up only 8 million of an official 20 million population. The Hui make up the largest share at 10 million. The Hui are Muslims identified by their religion rather than their territory, and can be found all across China. It is the Hui, for instance, who make up a large share of the Arabic translators in the coastal city of Yiwu, a hotspot for Arab traders.
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