The Iran-Saudi deal brokered by China

The China-brokered deal for Iran and Saudi Arabia to re-open their embassies announced on Friday last week is a big deal, at least symbolically. The Ginger River newsletter has an excellent summary of what happened and how official China sees the deal.

One of the interesting details that has been reported is that official communications at the negotiations were said to have been conducted only in Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese — no English used. This may have made life difficult for the negotiators, but it did send a message: China wants to be a player in international diplomacy and geopolitical chess, and other important countries with plentiful fossil fuel reserves are on board.

Of course, China may have bitten off more than it can chew in the Middle East, a very complicated place, as Carice Witte told me in our Q & A published last week about Israel’s relations with China.

China is resetting its visa regimen back to pre-pandemic rules, according to an announcement (in Chinese only) from Beijing’s embassy in Washington, D.C., and per a report from Bloomberg.

This would appear to mean that all the old visa rules are back in place, and specifically — because the announcement came from the embassy in the U.S. — that American holders of 10-year visitor visas can enter freely again.

We’ll see what this announcement means in practice in the coming months.

On a completely different note, the musician and creative pioneer Laurie Anderson spoke to The China Project’s Susan St.Denis about a new book she co-edited based on her late husband Lou Reed’s writings on tai chi. In the interview she says:

Of course this is an American interpretation, but I think that one of the things that Lou and [his tai chi teacher] Master Ren shared…are things that Americans and Chinese share. A very practical approach to the world, one in which you can improve yourself. These are both very basic to our cultures.

We’re not the French or the English. We are much closer to Chinese people in this…I mean, I’m talking obviously in ridiculous broad strokes, but I feel that the times I’ve been to China, I feel a rapport that is down to earth…And I see that in the brotherhood of Master Ren and Lou. I saw that sense of the physicality, the body, the practicality, the working hard, the work ethic, it was very, very much there in that friendship. That’s something to be celebrated in the relationship between our two cultures; it’s very important to see that. This is a gift in many ways, not just to Lou’s fans, but to Chinese culture.

This is an American artist who fell in love with Chinese martial arts and Chinese culture, and wanted to bring it to the world through his music. He wasn’t ever pretending to be an ambassador, but he wanted to say, “Here, look what I learned from this, and it’s my spin on it. So, it’s not a perfect spin, but I fell in love with this, and I want to show this to you.”

Finally: An opportunity for mid-career African-American China-focused professionals: the American Mandarin Society is now accepting applications to the African-American China Leadership Fellows Program. Deadline March 24.