A Syrian textile trader finds it hard to travel for business in the U.S. after 9/11, so he looks to China instead. China encourages members of its Hui Muslim minority to study Arabic and promote exchanges between the Middle East and China, while local officials in the east China trade hub of Yiwu build a mosque to welcome Muslim traders. Song Hongbing’s anti-Western polemic, “Currency Wars,” gains popularity in the Arab world, and the book’s author is interviewed on Arabic television.
These stories, as told by Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, are part of what he calls the “new silk road” emerging between China and the Middle East. It marks an increasing flow of trade and ideas, not just from East to West, but within the East as well. Simpfendorfer spoke at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Hong Kong today in connection with his new book, “The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China.”
The relations have already been strengthened by the Middle East’s energy wealth and China’s voracious appetite for oil and gas. Simpfendorfer forecasts that China will overtake the U.S. as the chief supplier of goods to the Middle East within a year or two. While the U.S. exports SUVs and Boeing airplanes to the Arab world, China has been providing DVD players, mobile phones and other consumer goods. The Middle East now sends more visitors to a single Chinese city, Yiwu, than to the entire United States (200,000 vs. 180,000 a year, according to Simpfendorfer). Before long, we may even see Gulf States moving away from pegging their currencies to the dollar, instead adopting a basket peg approach similar to China’s, he says.
But Simpfendorfer emphasizes that the relationship is not just economic, but also cultural. Islam, which came to China as early as the 7th Century, “is central to the silk road story,” he says.
The religion continues to play a role in the relations between the Middle Kingdom and Middle East. While still skittish about the role of the Islamic religion in places such as Xinjiang, which has seen unrest from members of the Muslim Uighur minority, China has allowed its 10 million Hui Muslims, who are spread across China, to build mosques, learn Arabic and travel to the Middle East for religious studies.
