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How China Sees the World and the Middle East

By shehab ⋅ June 17, 2009 ⋅ Email This ⋅ Print ⋅ Post a comment
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The Economist had a good piece on How China sees the World a few weeks ago with a customarily brilliant cover:


Though I am pretty sure the Middle East would register for its oil and gas.

New Silk RoadBen Simpendorfer who has a new book out called The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China. Sounds fascinating (inevitable given my deep interests in China and the MIddle East) is interviewed over at The New Yorker. Some highlights:

  • An estimated 200,000 Arab nationals visit a single Chinese coastal city called Yiwu each year. (The city boasts the world’s largest wholesale consumer goods market.) To put the figure into perspective, the United States received 680,000 Arab visitors last year.
  • The sheer number of Arabs travelling to China is something we haven’t seen for over four hundred years.
  • China overtook the United States as the world’s biggest exporter to the Middle East earlier this year.
  • China and the Middle East have only just started to reach out to each other.

    • This is where a lot of our region’s socio-geo-political-economic action will be unfolding in our lifetimes. A subscription to Simpendorfer’s blog probably recommended.

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