In his recently released book, The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China, Ben Simpfendorfer, chief China economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland in Hong Kong, examines China's rising popularity in the Arab world. This, marked in part by the migration of Arabic traders to the Mainland and what Simpfendorfer terms a "new silk road" emerging between China and the Middle East. The resurgence of such ties, however, is part and parcel of a much bigger picture:
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.