China and the Middle East (page 1 of 3)

Whether you are based in Dubai, Riyadh, London or Paris, and are looking out at the world around you, there seems to be one inescapable fact to take into account: for good or for bad, this is the American decade - a period of time in which the United States is clearly the world's single superpower.

To paraphrase an old saying, governments, political movements, rebel forces, businesspeople, even artists can be for the United States, or against the United States, or they can take some sort of intermediate position. But what they can't do right now, it seems, is to ignore the United States.

US foreign policy, cultural values and business practices have all become a kind of standard against which everyone else measures themselves. It is not going to be like this forever.

At some point after this decade is over, maybe from 2020 or 2030, or perhaps even earlier, China is going to achieve "superpower" status. We will once more move away from a "unipolar" world, where there is a single, dominant military and economic power.

In fact, even in the midst of this "American decade," China is already making a significant impact on the Arab world, and it will do so increasingly over the next few years. The starting point is to understand what is going on in one of the world's largest and most populated countries.

With a population of 1.3 billion people, China is currently experiencing a massive industrial revolution, and emerging as a manufacturing power of global significance. The scale of the transformation that is under way is hard to comprehend. One estimate is that at present no more than 200-300 million Chinese form part of what could be called the urban, market-based economy.

Within the space of the next two or three decades the current government believes that they will be joined by another 500 million people. That means that over the next 20-30 years a mass of people, roughly equivalent to the current population of Europe, will emigrate from thousands of poor Chinese villages into the towns and cities, where they will get jobs, seek education, open bank accounts and begin to join what could be called the consumer society.

Geographically and socially, this is a major upheaval. Any visitor to China's big cities can see this happening with their own eyes right now. In Beijing and other cities there is a building boom going on, with skyscrapers under construction 24 hours a day.

With rural immigrants pouring into the cities, cheap labor is plentifully available, and the building companies think nothing of running three consecutive eight-hour shifts a day.

Visitors have commented that the pace of life in Shanghai makes New York appear slow and sleepy. Urban and industrial development has traditionally evolved along China's eastern coastline, but the process is now beginning to move further west and inland.

Two of the most important development clusters are currently to be found around two eastern coast river deltas: the Yangtze delta, which includes Shanghai, and, further to the south, the Pearl River delta, including the province of Guangdong and the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton).

The "Yangtze corridor" is seen as the main "way in" to China, a massive transport artery for imports. The Pearl River delta, on the other hand, is the "way out" for China's equally massive export boom, flooding the world with highly competitive manufactured goods.

China is big and hungry, and it is going to get bigger and hungrier.