Mapping Connections Early Career Researcher Jie Wang contributed an essay titled “A Chinese Conversation Nādi in Cairo: The Grassroots Popularity of Mandarin Chinese in the Middle East” to the Focus section of Global China Pulse

In this new piece, Mapping Connections Early Career Researcher Jie Wang explores the history and meaning of a unique Arabic-language magazine, Sawt Al-Arab, which was published between 2013 and 2017 by a group of Arab diaspora residents living in China

On 30 January 2024, Professor Adam Hanieh delivered a lecture titled “The ‘East-East’ Hydrocarbon Circuit: Rethinking Middle East Oil and the World Market” at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge. Around forty students, academics, and visiting scholars from different faculties attended the lecture, which was followed by a reception.

The Western international relations concept “soft power” has deeply penetrated official, academic, and public vocabulary of China’s presence in the MENA region in this century. The Confucius Institute (CI) has become the Leitmotif of scholarship on China’s soft power in cultural domain. However, the region has also witnessed the emergence of a range of non-CI language or cultural-cum-language training spaces.

Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang is an internationally renowned Arabic calligrapher. Born to a Hui Muslim family in 1964, he has been fond of Arabic calligraphy since a teenager, and received systematic and professional training in Egypt and Turkey. In 1997, Haji Noor Deen became the first Chinese Muslim to be awarded the Egyptian Certificate of Arabic Calligraphy and was admitted as a member of the Association of Egyptian Calligraphy

1. 您在上世纪80年代开始学习阿拉伯书法。先是在中国，然后去到中东国家继续深造。您对阿拉伯书法的兴趣是如何开始的?

回民有个习惯。家里办红事时，比如结婚、搬新家，都喜欢在门上贴上阿拉伯文的经文。我们兄弟姊妹多。在我小的时候，大约7、8岁左右，家里总是有人结婚。每次哥哥们结婚的时候，我们都会把门刷黑，请阿訇写阿拉伯文经文，用红纸写上，然后贴在门框上。

Language is a wide-ranging subject. I would like to use this short blog to share my thoughts about why it is important to consider the Chinese language when we talk about 21st century Sino-Arab relations.