With the growing engagements between Middle Eastern countries and China in the twenty-first century and China’s recent One Belt One Road Initiative, Arab-Chinese interactions have become an increasingly important yet under-studied topic. In order to develop and promote work in this area over the next few years, the China-Arabia Encounters and Engagements Conference focused on particular areas through which Asia’s global connections were imagined and played out at different times in history.
The first panel of the conference opened with a set of papers focusing on Asian cities and spaces that generate global mobility and evoke narratives of such mobility, both of which remain central to the flow of international trade in the face of political exigencies and financial crises. The second and third panels engaged with aspects of a pan-Asiatic alliance in medieval times and the early 20th century respectively, focusing on the ways in which Arab statesmen and diasporic powers emerged as key players in constituting these alliances. The fourth panel looked at the ways in which particular cities and spaces associated with Islam, for example education and pilgrimage, become the contexts for the evolution of new ethnic identities such as the Turkistanis, the reinforcement of existing national identities as in the case of the Chinese Hui Muslims and the ways in which a global conception of Islam contribute and contradict these.
Presentations on the second day followed up on the themes of the first day, such as Chinese-speaking Sino-Muslims (including the myths of Naqshbandiyyah Sufi order in China, Da Pusheng and Ma Jian, and the transmission of Arabic-Persian texts to early modern China), but also ventured into new areas such as how Iran is represented in the Chinese social media WeChat, Chinese Christian missionary activities in Jerusalem, and the potentials of Chinese-Arab economic cooperation in the twenty-first century.
