The Middle East is plastered with posters of the region’s Kings, Presidents, and Prime Ministers. They are everywhere, from shops to street corners. So, it seems like a nice business to be printing them. At least, that’s what two Chinese entrepreneurs must have thought until they ended up in a Moroccan court last week. They’ve been lucky to escape with a $650 fine, according to this report, rather than going to prison. Their crime? Printing pictures of Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in China, only to be caught bringing them into Morocco.
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Tag Archives: China
The royal court is not amused
The Middle East braces itself for a flood of Chinese steel
Always a favorite of mine — a simple statistic that tells a simple story. This graph shows China‘s exports to the Middle East surging mid-2008, before later collapsing. A result of the economic crisis? Perhaps not. Draw a straight line through the graph, as I have in red, and it shows that exports are in fact on a relatively steady trajectory. So how to explain the mid-2008 surge? There‘s only limited details, but exports of base metals to Saudi Arabia jumped around the same time. Most likely these exports were steel products.
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Droughts and floods forge common bonds
Droughts, floods and more droughts─all that’s missing is a biblical rain of frogs. China’s Hunan province was struck by droughts late last year, but it’s now suffering from floods that are affecting 8 million people. Syria’s Hasakah province is meanwhile suffering from drought, a problem given the province’s importance to the country’s corn crop.
There is a connection. The governor of Hasakah province visited Hunan province early last year (see “What’s Syria up to in China’s central provinces of Hubei and Hunan?”). He was there to study Hunan’s growth strategy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if natural disaster prevention was high on the agenda.
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Qingdao’s mini Iran-Iraq war
I was in Qingdao for a wedding last week. The Chinese coastal city is best-known for its Tsingtao Brewery built by the Germans in 1903. And Tsingtao beer is now China’s main exported beer. In the 1980s, the Tsingtao beer company attempted to acquire a local rival. It was a long fight, and I was told that locals jokingly referred to it as the city’s mini-version of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Why? The Chinese media referred to the war as the “Yi-Yi” war, because the Chinese-words for Iran and Iraq both start with the character “Yi”.
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Syria grabs headlines. But it’s results that matter.
Al Hayat recently wrote about an investment conference in Syria‘s sovereign provinces. I was initially please to read that Chinese investors were in attendance. But I spoke with an ex-Syrian Minister of Finance in Doha last month, and he said that while agreements are being signed, far fewer are being implemented owing to the legal uncertainty of the investment.
It‘s an age-old complaint about emerging markets. “The legislation is there. The enforcement is not“. It’s one reason I’m more excited about Egypt’s opportunities (see “Egypt as Europe’s Backdoor”).
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Egypt as a European “eagle’s nest”
I read that China wants to invest in Greece’s main port, taking advantage of a “fire-sale” as Greece extricates itself from a debt crisis.
Why is China so interested in an economy on Europe’s periphery? China’s exports to Greece aren’t large. But the country is as a useful hub for Chinese manufacturers trying to sell into Eastern and Southern Europe. That’s one reason.
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Chinese banks and their Middle East ambitions
It’s back to blogging after a month of seemingly endless overseas travel and house moving.
China‘s banks are increasingly active in the Middle East. But details are scarce. This interview of a senior official from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) offers a few useful scraps. The official, Yi Huiman, was interviewed on the fringes of an Abu Dhabi-China investment conference being held in Shanghai. He says, “In the 1990s, large numbers of Korean and Japanese companies entered China, and their banks followed them. At present, ICBC is committed to following Chinese companies that are ‘going abroad“.
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Hui Muslims take a short-cut to Dubai
China‘s Muslim Hui population is important to the country‘s ties with the Middle East. The Hui are smaller in numbers than the majority Han, but they play an outsized role because of their status as China‘s largest Muslim population. So, I‘m always keen to see signs of their activities in the region. Here are two stories:
The first explains how a chartered flight has started between Yinchuan, the capital of the Hui‘s province of Ningxia, and Shenzhen in the south. The flight is used to send goods by air-freight, via Shenzhen, to Dubai. Previously, the article states, the goods had to travel through ports in Tianjin, which took up to 15 days. This creates a more direct link.
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Silk Road Gallery
Canton Trade Fair
August 12th, 2010
August 12th, 2010
“China cheat sheet helps investors survive”, Bloomberg, September 1, 2010
“No more silver bullets for Beijing”, Wall Street Journal, June 17, 2010
“China’s historic return to the Gulf”, Foreign Policy, April 2, 2010
