Here’s a gentle start to the New Year. It’s not a story you’ll find in the Financial Times or New York Times, but it neatly underscores how relations between China and the Middle East are developing. It seems that the Chinese coastal city of Yiwu hosted a football match between China and Jordan on December 31. Why Yiwu? The city is a virtual Arab market town with more than a dozen Arabic restaurants in the main street. The match was a warm-up ahead of the Asian Cup Qualifiers. Apparently, China scored the first two goals only for “poor skill to break the door”, according to this good-humored Chinese-language article, and Jordan subsequently equalized to leave the match drawn at 2-2. The article claims that 300 Jordanians attended the match and another 20 went to meet the team at the airport. But the match was an international affair — two Koreans were first in line to buy tickets when they went on sale and 1,000 foreigners made up part of the 10,000 strong crowd. The article is worth a look if only for the sight of Jordanian flags being waved madly in a small Chinese stadium. For those keen, China is playing Syrian in Hangzhou on January 6.
It’s two weeks since Valentine’s Day. But I’ve just read Egyptian cleric Hazem Shuman’s criticism of the holiday. And I think it deserves repeating.
“I have come tonight to warn all boys and girls about an extremely dangerous virus, which is about to attack the hearts of the nation’s youth…we must confront this Valentine virus!”, he says. Shuman has an important point to make. It’s just not the point he intended.
The export of Western culture to the Middle East has long been a potential source of social friction: this is well known. Less well known, however, is that China has a role to play.
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They’re back. Traders from across the Silk Road are again visiting Yiwu.
The small coastal city is China’s largest distributor of small consumer goods. It sells mainly to Silk Road traders. But the city’s exhibition halls were empty when I visited in early July. Stall holders sat outside their empty shops playing cards with each other.
What happened? The government tightened its visa policy ahead of the Olympics worried about security during the event. It wasn’t just Silk Road traders that struggled to obtain visas. American and European bankers and CEOs also faced problems.
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