The New Silk Road - or Why I Went to Yiwu

It’s extremely rare that Urban Dirt trundles into the territory of book reviews, and with good reason. As I look left from my desk at the office shelves, I see a work library built on whim, pragmatism and donation. Here is Family and Social Policy in Japan by my old tutor, Roger Goodman, squeezed between Morita’s Made in Japan and Tirman’s 100 Ways America is Screwing Up The World. Over there is Morinosuke’s Neon Genesis of Geeky-Girl Japanese Engineering, Love Letters at Sixty, Bobby Fischer Goes to War and Yakuza Money. This is absolutely not the collection of someone who takes an orderly approach to books, and I have always avoided the discipline of sharing my thoughts on any of them.

 

But sitting on the desk in front of me is work that cries out to be made the exception: Ben Simpfendorfer’s compact but impressive The New Silk Road.

 

The well-stocked business bookshelf should, by now, have a thick wedge of China-related material in it. But it is also high time to junk the sort of breathless “Blimey, isn’t China big?” fodder that used to pad that section out. With the Olympics over and - who knows? - a newly shaped economic order emerging, the need is for more tightly-focused analysis of China’s tendrils – where they go, what they feed on and what oozes out of them. This book answers that need and, unlike a dozen travel books on my bedside table, is written with enough energy to make me drop everything and book the first flight to Yiwu. More on that in The Times later this week, but suffice to say that Simpfendorfer makes you want to go.

 

There can be no doubt that the New Silk Road’s theme, of China’s strengthening ties with the Arab and Islamic world, deserves infinitely more attention than it gets. The fact that it currently doesn’t goes a long way to proving the book’s thesis that China and the Middle East increasingly “get” each other – their relationship is modern, while relations between the Islamic world and the West feel antiquated and handicapped by history. Simpfendorfer’s subject is one on which there is an alarming poverty of Western insight and understanding. And that, ultimately, is why the China-Arab relationship is allowed to grow at such a startling pace.

 

The chapter on the geopolitics of China’s search for oil waves countless red flags over western complacency. Simpfendorfer attaches great significance to a remark by the Saudi ambassador to Washington - “China is not necessarily a better friend than the United States, but it is a less complicated friend” - and so, I’m sure, should we. In his closing paragraph, Simpfendorfer wonders aloud whether the West has realised the full magnitude of the changes related in the 172 pages that preceded it. He does not have to spell out how skimpily the issue has been covered elsewhere. In their bid to paint the bigger picture, World is Flat merchants like Thomas Friedman have missed the giant mural that covers the walls and ceiling.

Simpfendorfer’s day job is chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland; before that he was a senior economist at JP Morgan. Those titles, and the dryish, analytical tone of his day-to-day output conceal something far more interesting: he is fluent in both Arabic and Chinese and has a clear taste for expending shoe leather on the street-level search for evidence. In a chapter on the differing statuses of women at either end of the Silk Road, Simpfendorfer describes taking a box of electronic Korans, assembled by women migrants from Guangxi in a Shenzhen factory, from China to Syria. He then engages Islamic scholars on the question of whether the Arab world would ever ditch its male-centric work patterns to emulate China’s more egalitarian growth model. It is compelling, pleasingly nerdish research.

The macro themes of the book are huge – the blossoming trade links identified along the New Silk Road are nothing less than than what its author calls “the early tremors of a historic global rebalancing”. But what makes them digestible is the rich cast of people Simpfendorfer has met in his travels, spoken with at length and used to convey it all. Occasionally, one feels he would have preferred to stay among the hookah smoke and chaos of the souk than coming back to Hong Kong and putting pen to paper.

The New Silk Road leaves plenty of questions unanswered, which is fine. If anything it heightens the sense that the issues surrounding Chinese growth are more delicately poised than we assume. At its heart, Simpfendorfer’s book identifies the Middle East as a compass set at the centre of the word, and one we should be watching closely. China’s magnetic pull may not yet be as strong as America’s but The New Silk Road explains why some of the more important needles are instinctively turning in that direction.

Comments

[aragoto]

Fascinating. Will have to read it.