48 Dirasat

What Knowledge Is Sought in ? Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019

Kyle Haddad - Fonda

What Knowledge Is Sought in China? Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda

Kyle Haddad - Fonda 4 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019

© King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, 2019 King Fahd National Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Haddad Fonda, Kyle What Knowledge Is Sought in China: Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda. / Haddad Fonda, Kyle.- Riyadh, 2019

48 p ; 23 x 16.5 cm

ISBN: 978-603-8268-23-0

1- Propaganda, Chinese I-Title 303.3750951 dc 1440/11524

L.D. no. 1440/11524 ISBN: 978-603-8268-23-0 Table of Contents

Abstract 6 The standard itinerary in the 1950s 10 The Standard Itinerary up to 2018 17 Since the Crackdown 31 Can China’s Arab Outreach Be Successful? 35

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Abstract This article investigates the experiences of Arab dignitaries, , youth groups, and trade envoys who have visited the People’s Republic of China in an official or semiofficial capacity since China’s initial overtures to Middle Eastern countries in 1955. First, it outlines the “standard itineraries” given to Arab delegations touring China both in the 1950s and in the twenty- first century, demonstrating how the changes to this agenda reflect the shifting priorities of the Chinese state. Second, it explores how the Chinese government has refined the vision of Chinese Islam that it presents to visitors from the , taking into account ’s changing attitude toward expressions of Islamic piety. Finally, this article asserts that, despite the social and political transformation China has undergone since 1949, the Chinese government has tried to impart to its guests a remarkably consistent ideological message about Chinese unity. Ever since the government of the People’s Republic of China first began sponsoring tours for Arab visitors in the mid-1950s, pious Muslims have justified their visits to an avowedly atheist country by invoking a supposed saying of the Prophet Muhammad to “seek knowledge even unto China.” Although religious scholars doubt the authenticity of this hadith, it has inspired many believers to explore a distant and unfamiliar society. In order to gauge the political, cultural, and ideological influence that China exerts on the , researchers must first understand exactly what these travelers have found upon their arrival—to ask, in other words, what knowledge one might be able to seek in China. From the perspective of 2019, this question takes on added significance. China is in the midst of a nationwide crackdown on expressions of religiosity, which has hit Chinese Muslims especially hard. According to estimates, as many as one million ethnic Uighurs have been detained in “reeducation” camps in China’s northwestern region of .1 Chinese Muslims beyond Xinjiang have also been subject to increasing pressure, especially since the state-run China Islamic Association detailed its plans to “Sinicize” Chinese Islam during the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in March 2018.2 In such an environment, China’s leaders must make a deliberate and concerted effort to ensure positive coverage for their country in the international media, especially in Islamic countries, where audiences may object to Beijing’s repressive policies. In recent years, the Chinese government’s strategies for manipulating public perceptions around the world have begun to receive widespread attention from Western journalists and academics. The most detailed investigations have focused on such topics as the expansion of China Global Television Network and China Radio International, the outright purchase of international media outlets by Chinese companies, and the spread of paid supplements about China in foreign newspapers.3 This last topic even became the subject of a high-level diplomatic

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incident during the 2018 American midterm election campaign, when President Donald Trump complained at a session of the United Nations Security Council that a paid China Daily supplement in the Des Moines Register constituted foreign interference in the electoral process.4 As public critiques of Beijing’s influence operations become more frequent, analysts are beginning to delve into a wider range of Chinese initiatives, including in the non-Western world. China’s outreach to Arab journalists has not yet been the focus of systematic scrutiny, despite the obvious high stakes of that enterprise. One challenge facing any scholar of China’s Arab propaganda efforts is the need to account for the Chinese government’s shifting attitude toward Islam. Accordingly, it is necessary to take a broad historical look at the evolution of China’s propaganda tours for Arab journalists. Many of the strategies that the Chinese government devised and perfected to impress Arab visitors in the 1950s have continued to guide Chinese officials in their interactions with Arabs in the twenty-first century. China’s leaders began encouraging representatives from around the world to visit China in the mid-1950s. Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister told fellow delegates from Asian and African countries at the Bandung Conference in April 1955 that the exchange of “friendly visits” would help “promote mutual understanding and cooperation.”5 This proposal, like the similar invitation Zhou had offered to Western diplomats and journalists at the Geneva Conference one year before, triggered a frenzy of excitement. From late 1954 through the end of the decade, China played host to a steady stream of international visitors, who came to investigate and evaluate the Communist regime. Among those who traveled to China were diplomats, government ministers, journalists, student delegations, women’s organizations, and civil society groups representing a diverse array of nationalities and political beliefs. By one accounting, a total of 435 delegations from non-communist countries toured China in the year 1956 alone.6 Chinese propaganda tours have long captured the attention of Western scholars. Initially, this interest was the result of Cold War paranoia. Soon after Zhou welcomed the first wave of foreigners to China, Western analysts who were concerned about the prospect of communist “subversion” began to catalog and dissect the flurry of reports filed by those who had accepted the invitation.7 Although scholars in the United States and Europe inevitably relied on publications about China in English and other European languages, they did not overlook China’s efforts to attract travelers from non-Western countries.8 In recent years, sophisticated historical research on China’s interactions with foreigners, based on Chinese archival sources, has helped reveal how Chinese officials prepared to receive tourists.9 Scholars have also begun to reexamine the experiences of Americans and Europeans who traveled to China, focusing on subjects of particular interest to Western readers such as British Labour Party delegations or African-American leftists.10 It is important for historians to build on this trend by also reevaluating how Chinese officials in the same era interacted with individuals from non-Western countries who journeyed to China. Today, it is all too easy to overlook the significance of Chinese propaganda tours. As China’s capacity for public diplomacy has expanded, it has often been able to influence overseas audiences directly through its own institutions, which have footholds around the globe. Yet China’s initiatives abroad should not distract from the fact that Beijing continues to arrange tours for official or semiofficial delegations, much as it did in the 1950s. Far from being a relic of the Cold War, these tours remain an important component of China’s cultural diplomacy. This report considers China’s propaganda tours in historical perspective, comparing the first efforts of the 1950s with those of the twenty-first century— both before and after the recent crackdown on Chinese Islam. It highlights the ways in which the Chinese state involves its own Muslim population as a promotional tool and questions whether that practice can endure in a more highly charged political environment.

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The first goal of this report is to distill an eclectic range of publications about China by Arab travelers in the 1950s and 2010s in order to present side by side the organization of Chinese propaganda tours in these two eras. Second, this report explains how the Chinese government has refined its messaging about Islam since the 1950s; whereas it was once eager to feature Muslims of a variety of ethnicities from throughout the country, it is now much more proactive about presenting a particular, carefully curated vision of Chinese Islam. Third, this report traces how Chinese officials have used foreign visits to present a consistent vision of China as a unified society. Finally, it evaluates the effectiveness of propaganda tours by demonstrating how such visits continue to frame the terms by which China is discussed in the - language press.

The standard itinerary in the 1950s The first foreigners to arrive in Communist China in the 1950s encountered a system designed to control everything they saw, heard, or experienced inside the country. Tourists were the responsibility of the China International Travel Service (CITS), an arm of the state bureaucracy tasked with promoting China to its guests. Visitors from around the world lodged in special guesthouses far removed from the general public. They were reliant on government-provided translators, who did their best to make sure their charges saw only what they were supposed to see. One Swiss , rankled by the restrictions placed on him in summer 1956, groused that CITS “will hold [a visitor] tight in its claws and direct his every act unless he summons the energy to break free of it.” He concluded that CITS “functions with smooth efficiency as long as the visitor sticks to the beaten track; it breaks down completely as soon as he takes a single step off the tourist trail.”11 This inflexibility ensured conformity. Taking all visitors to the same model villages was one way to assure that no aspect of any tour would be left to chance. It was not rare for foreigners who asked to visit the countryside to discover, in the words of British journalist, “a place so immaculate that its roads were tramped smooth by the feet of endless delegations that had gone before.”12 The effort to ensure that all foreigners received a positive experience in China began with the assiduous attention of the top leadership. One scholar noted after combing through Chinese archives that “documents outlining even mundane arrangements”—everything from the wording of invitations to banquet preparations—bore personal annotations from prominent (CCP) figures such as Zhou and .13 China’s leaders were so concerned to make sure their underlings performed their duties effectively that they compelled all cadres who would interact with foreigners to attend “report meetings” to learn about political trends and to study summaries of previous successful visits.14 In some cases, the micromanaging by the Chinese government even extended to young children. One defector recalled a situation in which CCP officials contrived to impress the wives of African dignitaries. They instructed a woman to give her three-year-old daughter a doll that had been painted black in order to accustom her to people with dark skin, then specified exactly how the woman and her family should train the girl to greet the visitors and then reward her with chocolate.15 The preparations for receiving Arab visitors also required special attention, since it was necessary to make sure ordinary Chinese citizens would do nothing to embarrass guests of a different cultural background. Again, the upper echelon of the state bureaucracy played a direct role in the arrangements. For example, the Ministry of Culture in Beijing established strict ground rules for all local party cadres who might come into contact with Egyptian Minister of Pious Endowments Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri in May 1955: do not drink alcohol or eat pork within sight of him, put him up only in hotel rooms that had a bathtub for him to wash his feet before prayer, and do not allow women to greet him.16

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Considering that all details of foreign tours were so tightly scripted, it is safe to conclude that patterns in how visitors were treated in China reflected explicit government policies. In 1957, the American political scientist Richard Walker relied on this logic to discern what he called a “standard itinerary” for visitors to China. The typical trip, according to Walker, lasted between twenty days and two months. Most travelers entered the country via , then journeyed by train to Beijing. From there, many itineraries included visits to factories in Manchuria. Other common destinations were Xi’an, Lanzhou, and Chongqing. Some travelers continued past Lanzhou to the oil refinery at Yumen City in northwest Province. Finally, most travelers stopped in before returning to Hong Kong. Walker noted that many delegations received invitations to come to China during major holidays— especially the May Day, Red Army Day, and National Day observances—so that they could witness elaborate military parades. He also identified particular model villages, prisons, factories, and collective farms that served as frequent stops on official tours.17 In each of these locations, visitors listened to canned lectures from Communist officials about China’s supposed triumphs since 1949. As a dedicated Cold Warrior who contributed to the campaigns of the United States Information Agency, Walker was exasperated by visitors who parroted the official productivity statistics from these lectures after their return from China.18 One consequence of the Chinese tourist bureaucracy was, in Walker’s words, that each visitor “is obviously so limited in the duration and extent of his travels that he must rely on the figures of the regime for placing what he has seen into some sort of overall account when he makes his report after leaving China.”19 Walker’s useful idea of a standard itinerary must be slightly modified if it is to be applied to Arab and Muslim visitors to China during the 1950s. First, Walker greatly underestimated the percentage of foreigners who traveled to China by way of the . While many of the Westerners and South Asians whom Walker cataloged did, in fact, enter China through Hong Kong and , many visitors from other parts of the world traveled via and Yekaterinburg on Soviet planes. Prior to the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, China benefited from tapping into existing Soviet networks that sponsored tours of the Communist bloc.20 The Soviet government patronized a variety of leftist organizations, such as the International Union of Students and the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), which explicitly tried to attract participants from the Middle East and Africa. As a result, some Arabs who came to China in the 1950s did so under the auspices of these organizations.21 Moreover, when Algerian representatives began to visit China following the establishment of a provisional Algerian government in 1958, they virtually always stopped in Moscow before venturing into China. Many Algerians continued their tour of the Communist bloc by traveling on to Hanoi, where they were eager to discuss with North Vietnamese officials their shared experience of fighting French colonialism.22 Arabs who saw China alongside other Communist countries were free to pick and choose the particular symbolism they wished to ascribe to each country. Rather than portraying China as emblematic of the global Communist movement, they tended to compare and contrast it with the Soviet Union and North Vietnam, drawing different lessons from each experience. The second key departure for Arab visitors from the standard itinerary as identified by Walker concerned which Chinese cities were part of the schedule. In addition to the main destinations Walker listed, some Arab delegations also spent a few days in Urumqi. As the capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi offered Chinese officials the opportunity to play up the fact that China was home to a large Muslim population. In May 1955, al-Baquri spent the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of Ramadan at a state-sponsored all-night party in Urumqi. The event was hosted by Burhan Shahidi, an ethnic Tatar who served in various CCP leadership positions in Xinjiang and as president of the China Islamic

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Association.23 One year later, delegations of Muslims from Pakistan and enjoyed the very same party, this time hosted by the chairman of the newly created Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Saifuddin Azizi.24 The Chinese government’s strategy of bringing Muslims to Urumqi for Eid al- Fitr, an obvious extension of its policy to bring foreigners to Beijing for the National Day parades, demonstrated how easily religious holidays could be co-opted to serve the needs of the state. Perhaps the most notable additions to the standard itinerary for Arab visitors were and other sites of religious significance. Chinese officials took Arabs to important mosques in several cities, including Beijing’s Oxen Street and Xi’an’s Great Mosque. Since so many visitors passed through Guangzhou, that city’s Huaisheng Mosque was another common destination. Chinese Muslims enthusiastically told their guests the legend that the mosque had been built by Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. While this origin is almost certainly apocryphal, it was a useful story because it drew an explicit link between the heritage of China’s Hui community and the Arabs they hoped to impress.25 The Chinese government regularly dispatched senior CCP officials to preside over visits to mosques, as when Shahidi himself welcomed the Muslim members of a WFDY group to a mosque in Beijing in the mid-1950s.26 Important statesmen attended relatively low-level events such as this one both to impress the visitors and to supervise those few Muslims who were trusted to speak to foreigners. For example, when one Egyptian journalist posed a question about Marxism-Leninism during a mosque visit, the president of the national Religious Affairs Bureau had to jump in to the conversation to correct a local Muslim who had strayed from the official line.27 The Chinese government was so committed to the idea that Arabs should visit Islamic institutions that it risked the occurrence of potentially embarrassing situations. In March 1958, for example, it arranged for a delegation consisting of an Algerian militant and a Syrian politician to address local Muslims at a Qur’anic school, even though the latter man was a Christian.28 In addition to mosques, Arabs also frequently toured factories, model villages, and communal farms. All these sites were common destinations for visitors of every nationality, but what distinguished the itineraries given to Arabs was the emphasis the tour leaders placed on meeting Chinese Muslims in each location. Their goal was to prove that Muslims not only were tolerated under the Communist regime, but actually benefited economically and educationally from the government’s modernization efforts. For example, Chinese officials arranged for al-Baquri to speak with a Muslim factory worker, who emphasized the growing prosperity of his community since 1949.29 To demonstrate the educational attainment of their Muslim population, Chinese officials had to depart from their standard practice by allowing local Muslims to converse with visitors in Arabic. Generally, Chinese citizens who had mastered foreign languages were not allowed to speak those languages in formal conversations with visitors because government regulations required that an approved interpreter be present for every conversation.30 Even Zhou, who spoke fluent English and French, would call over a translator whenever he was asked a direct question by a foreign journalist.31 With Arabic, however, the standards appear to have been somewhat relaxed. It was routine for vetted Chinese Muslims to speak in Arabic with Arab visitors, much to the surprise and delight of journalists who came to China.32 As was the case with visitors from around the world, Chinese officials were also keen to involve Arabs in political rallies and parades. In the Maoist era of mass mobilization, it was common for officials to schedule important visits to coincide with planned political events. For example, when Omar Oussedik, the head of a military delegation sent by Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale, visited Beijing in March and April 1959, his handlers arranged for him to address a rally of some 1,500 people, who chanted slogans

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about Algerian independence that had been preapproved by the Foreign Ministry.33 Chinese officials also included visiting Arab dignitaries in their annual National Day celebrations on October 1. Some attendees, such as the exiled Syrian communist Khalid Bakdash, who attended in 1959, were invited to address large crowds before the parade.34 Others, including Arab journalists on government-sponsored tours, were merely encouraged to attend the main military parade, which was designed each year to wow observers with the might and precision of the Chinese forces.35 It was routine for the parade’s organizers to station foreign visitors of all backgrounds (including Europeans and Americans) on the reviewing stand near groups of Chinese minorities, underscoring the importance that China’s government placed on its claim to preside over a multiethnic society.36 Another effective propaganda tactic that Chinese officials employed in the 1950s was to introduce their Arab visitors to educated young women. These meetings have not been extensively recognized or studied by scholars of China’s foreign outreach, but they deserve attention because of the remarkable impact they made on Arab guests. It is safe to assume that Chinese officials also introduced young women—in all likelihood, the very same young women—to people from many different countries, but such encounters were not widely mentioned in memoirs by Westerners who went to China. Initially, Chinese leaders were squeamish about allowing women to interact with visitors from the Middle East at all, as evidenced by the Ministry of Culture’s instructions not to allow female cadres to greet al-Baquri. These concerns soon faded, however, presumably because Chinese administrators began to appreciate that the Arabs who made the journey to China were generally progressive thinkers who viewed women’s education as a symbol of modernization. The women selected to meet Arab visitors were generally university students of the Han ethnicity. Their primary mission was to convey their generation’s enthusiasm for building a new China. “It is very important for me to decide that my personal future is inseparable from the future of my country,” one twenty-one-year-old woman told a Lebanese journalist in 1953, “for if my country is not happy then there is no assurance for my own future.”37 This unvarnished nationalist sentiment was deeply moving for Arabs who hoped to instill a similar patriotic zeal in their own societies. Arab visitors also seemed especially willing to believe Chinese claims about religious tolerance when speaking with passionate young women. For example, an eighteen-year-old female student from Peking University told ‘Ali Hamdi al-Jamal, the editor of the Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar, that she was a committed atheist but that she respected all religions. Al-Jamal accepted this statement without question and cited it approvingly to prove that Chinese society was tolerant and diverse.38 Together, these encounters with young women demonstrated the facility with which Chinese officials appealed to their guests on an emotional level. They worked to make sure that a trip to China was not merely an opportunity for tourism, but also an occasion for profound societal reflection.

The Standard Itinerary up to 2018 Although Walker formulated his concept of a standard itinerary at the height of the Cold War, his framework remains relevant because the Chinese government still carefully controls the image it presents to the world. China’s leaders continue to expend large sums to bring representatives from foreign countries—especially in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America—to tour China and report back about their experiences. Of course, the relative openness of twenty-first-century China, combined with the convenience of modern air travel, means that many Arabs can and do acquire tourist visas and travel to China on their own. In the past decade, some Arab visitors have even published Arabic-language accounts of their self-guided travels.39 Large numbers of Arab students have enrolled in Chinese universities for long-term courses, especially in the sciences. And an ever-increasing

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number of Arabs have traveled to China in recent years for the purpose of conducting business. Some businessmen have settled permanently in China, joining growing Middle Eastern communities in certain commercial centers such as Guangzhou and the industrial city of Yiwu in Province.40 This report is not concerned with Arabs who visit China independently or who remain in the country for extended periods of time. Rather, it asserts that the best way to understand how China presents itself to the Arab world is to focus on delegations that travel in an official or semiofficial capacity and are formally received by institutions linked to the Chinese state. Such delegations frequently include journalists, who are often invited on fully funded trips to attend special events in China because of their ability to reach large audiences in their home countries. The Chinese government is also eager to attract other delegations of visitors who are potentially influential, including academics, policymakers, and business leaders. The first step toward understanding how China’s leaders try to appeal to such visitors is to piece together the standard itinerary for their travels in China. Because Beijing’s crackdown on Islam has forced Chinese host institutions to modify some of their strategies for engaging with visitors from the Middle East, it is useful to look first at the standard itinerary prior to 2018 before focusing on the past two years. Between 2010 and 2018, Chinese Muslims participated to an unprecedented degree in organizing propaganda tours and interacting with visitors. The willingness of China’s leaders to highlight religious connections in their outreach reflected their eagerness to control the narrative through which Arab journalists and intellectuals discussed Chinese Islam. Although China is more accessible from the Middle East now than ever before, official delegations in the 2010s visited a much smaller roster of places than they did in the 1950s. The advent of direct flights to Beijing from many Arab capitals means it is not necessary to fly through Hong Kong or Moscow. In addition, delegations no longer need to take arduous train trips with several stops while traveling from one major Chinese city to another. But the most conspicuous difference between the 1950s and the twenty-first century is that Xinjiang is far more politically sensitive. Local and national officials welcomed Arab groups to Urumqi for Eid al-Fitr in both 1955 and 1956, but throughout the early twenty-first century the Chinese government has been disinclined to show off a region racked by ethnic conflict. In the period from the mid-2000s through 2018, a new location emerged as the focus of China’s Islamic diplomacy: , the autonomous region ostensibly governed by members of the Hui community. In the early 2000s, a surge of investment in that region, especially in the capital city of Yinchuan, turned it into a viable destination for foreign tourists. With Beijing’s support, Ningxia’s regional government sponsored political, economic, and academic conferences. Consequently, it became almost de rigueur for official or semiofficial Arab delegations to visit the region. An influx of government investment in Yinchuan transformed the city in a manner befitting its new status as the primary destination for Arab delegations. Among the ventures launched in Yinchuan were a $3.6 billion scheme to construct a “World Muslim City” and a 900,000-square-foot terminal at Yinchuan Hedong International Airport to accommodate direct flights from Dubai, , and .41 The local government also completed a project to add Arabic transliterations to every street sign in the city. These initiatives were part of an explicit plan to make Yinchuan a “global tourism destination” that could attract visitors from the Middle East.42 The highest profile aspect of this plan was the biennial China–Arab States Expo, which brought together businessmen and politicians from China and the Arab world. Although the Expo captured international headlines, it was the smaller, less heralded gatherings in Yinchuan that typified China’s outreach to the Arab world. The city’s state-of-the-art conference facilities hosted everything from conventions of Chinese and Arab tour guides to summits for Middle Eastern

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university professors. Collectively, these events enhanced China’s efforts to burnish its image abroad; even relatively minor conferences, such as the one marking the visit of a Kuwaiti female student delegation to Yinchuan in January 2016, offered the potential for extensive positive coverage in the Arabic press.43 The many Middle East–themed events in Yinchuan also provided fodder for more direct public diplomacy by Chinese officials in the Arab world, whose aggressive promotion of Yinchuan reflected the extent to which the Chinese government envisioned the city as a hub for all interactions with Arabs in China.44 When Arab travelers arrived in Yinchuan, their itineraries virtually always included two particular destinations: the China Hui Culture Park and a local mosque. The Hui Culture Park, which opened in 2005 and expanded several times over the course of the subsequent decade, is a lavish theme park that celebrates the history and culture of the Hui. The park boasts a 125-foot-high main gate inspired by the Taj Mahal, a museum of Islamic artifacts shaped like the Chinese character for “Hui,” and a $31.5 million nighttime pageant based on The Thousand and One Nights. Until recently, it employed dozens of local Muslim youths who had studied the Arabic language and were trained to interact with Arab visitors.45 By bringing foreigners to the park, Chinese officials injected some excitement into what could otherwise be a fairly dour schedule. In contrast to the relentless lectures and recitations of official statistics that characterized most tours of China in the 1950s, the twenty-first-century itinerary for Arab guests included a bit of fun. The primary purpose of the Hui Culture Park, however, was to dazzle visitors with its sheer size, supposedly proving that the Chinese government was willing to expend vast sums to celebrate its Muslim citizens. In general, Arab visitors to Yinchuan seemed duly impressed by the park’s grandiosity. A journalist for one Qatari magazine, for example, expressed awe at the “enormous architectural complex of buildings with gold- colored minarets and domes” and admired the Qur’anic inscriptions found on many of the park’s buildings.46 Similarly, an Algerian visitor raved about the park’s “magical splendor and historical sublimity.”47 Such comments not only enhanced China’s reputation for treating its Muslim population with respect, but also reinforced the more prosaic notion that China is a wealthy country where every new construction takes on an extravagant scale. Many Arab delegations explored the Hui Culture Park immediately before or after a trip to a nearby mosque. Several mosques in Yinchuan attracted foreign visitors, including the Tongxin Great Mosque and the Emirati-financed Sheikh Zayed Mosque in the neighboring city of Wuzhong.48 But by far the most common destination for Arab delegations was the Najiahu Mosque, which is located within walking distance of the Hui Culture Park in Yinchuan’s Yongning County. The Najiahu Mosque was originally built during the Ming Dynasty to serve the residents of the surrounding Na Village. It was converted into a ball-bearing factory during the , but it was subsequently renovated and opened to tourists.49 One reason the Najiahu Mosque received so many visitors was that it was built in the traditional Chinese style, with palace-style courtyards and minarets that resemble pagodas. Because Chinese officials wish to remind their visitors of the long history of , it is most useful to show them a mosque in the historical style. The other main reason for the prominence of the Najiahu Mosque was its proximity to the Hui Culture Park. Yinchuan’s authorities attempted to concentrate the city’s Islamic-themed tourist sites in one neighborhood, thereby making it somewhat easier to control what Arab visitors would see in the city. The designation of the Najiahu Mosque as the go-to mosque for Arab delegations meant that the mosque’s imam became an important part of China’s diplomatic outreach. On a regular basis, he was called upon to engage Arab visitors in discussions of Chinese Islam. As in the 1950s, Chinese authorities preferred for foreigners to converse with practiced dignitaries,

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who could articulate the party line, rather than with unrehearsed ordinary citizens, who might more easily be led off-script. Consequently, the published reports of Arabs who were taken to the Najiahu Mosque tended to present identical accounts of identical discussions with the same imam. For example, a Jordanian journalist and a Qatari journalist, who both traveled to Yinchuan in the summer of 2014, each quoted word-for-word the imam’s explanation of the impact of an important Chinese foreign policy initiative: “the Arabic language is seeing marked expansion and growing interest from all categories of Chinese society, indicating that the establishment of the ‘New Silk Road’ will lead to the spread of the Arabic language in a significant way.”50 In addition to promoting Arabic language education in Ningxia, the imam was tasked with explaining such topics as the benefits Muslims received from the One Child Policy (which was, until 2015, an important piece of propaganda about Chinese minority policy, though it is a moot point today now that the policy has been relaxed). So consistent was the itinerary that Chinese officials offered to Arab visitors that it was possible to find articles about visitors from Yemen, , , the United Arab Emirates, and Algeria who met with the same imam inside the Najiahu Mosque.51 In Ningxia, the focus on Islam pervaded nearly every aspect of the itineraries given to Arab visitors. Even outings designed primarily to tout China’s economic prowess also reminded visitors of the opportunities that the country’s development gave to local Muslims. In the 1950s, a period when the Chinese government adhered to a Marxist worldview that glorified heavy industry, factory tours highlighted the most ambitious projects of the new China: oil refineries, concrete plants, truck factories, and, especially during the Great Leap Forward, furnaces for manufacturing steel in tremendous quantities. Officials might have arranged for their Arab guests to meet Muslim factory workers, as al-Baquri did, but such encounters were incidental to the main goal of demonstrating that the CCP was capable of transforming China. In the 2010s, by contrast, no one could doubt that China had become a leader in heavy industry, so the Chinese government did not need to make its largest factories part of its propaganda tours. Instead, Arabs in Ningxia usually visited smaller operations, most often those that packaged and shipped halal food.52 These encounters served two complementary purposes. First, they provided reassurance that halal food in China—much of which is exported to the Middle East at great profit—is made according to proper Islamic standards. Second, they demonstrated that Chinese Muslims have benefited from China’s economic boom without abandoning their religious and cultural heritage. Despite the consistent emphasis that the Chinese government placed on Islam during propaganda tours prior to 2018, Arab visitors did have the opportunity to meet non-Muslim Chinese citizens. In that period, one of the most ubiquitous participants in China’s outreach to Arab visitors was a female student at Beijing Foreign Studies University who performed Arabic-language songs by the Lebanese singer Fayrouz. This student, who was tapped to perform for Arab delegations in both Beijing and Ningxia, consistently earned acclaim from her audiences.53 One Jordanian visitor, who saw her perform in Yinchuan, called her “the biggest surprise” of his trip to China and raved that she sang “with a wonderful voice and accent.”54 This singer’s renown was such that she became a symbol of Chinese propaganda even when she was not present to perform. For example, a Muslim woman from the neighborhood around the Najiahu Mosque boasted to a Qatari journalist about a previous performance by the singer and averred that her mastery of Arab music “represented the blending of cultures between the Arab peoples and the people of China.”55 In all likelihood, the fact that a Jordanian newspaper and a Qatari magazine used nearly identical language two months apart to describe this singer reflected the extent to which the Muslims who greeted foreigners in Ningxia stuck to a prepared script, especially when speaking in Arabic. China’s various levels of government bureaucracy featured the singer of Fayrouz songs because her

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pitch-perfect Arabic proved that some non-Muslim Chinese citizens have embraced Arab culture. One might also interpret her frequent presence as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the 1950s strategy of introducing visitors to young Han women. The Chinese government discovered that Arab visitors tend to have positive emotional reactions to encounters with poised, worldly female students. While the details of how Chinese officials engineered those encounters evolved, the fundamental logic behind them remained the same. One aspect of the standard itinerary that clearly did change after the 1950s, however, was the decreasing emphasis on domestic politics. The Chinese government still arranged for academics and think tank scholars to engage their guests in ideological conversations at conferences, but the topics at such events were virtually always about international affairs, rather than anything about events inside China.56 Gone were the days when Chinese officials would shepherd visitors to rallies, demonstrations, and mass meetings to inspire Chinese citizens who were engaged in national mobilization campaigns. The most obvious reason for this change was the demise of Maoist mass politics, which routinely blended international and local issues to rile up the populace. At the same time, the reluctance of the Chinese government to offer Arab visitors any window into China’s internal affairs also reflected its profound sensitivity to foreign criticism of domestic politics.

The Evolving Islamic Narrative No one who has endured the full-court press of Chinese hospitality could possibly describe the experience as subtle. In 1956, one French journalist, irked by the relentless pageantry calculated to impress him, wrote that he felt “suffocated” by the constant attention of his minders.57 The penchant of China’s leaders for blunt language and grand displays has led most analysts to evaluate Chinese propaganda tours in stark terms. They pose questions such as “Was the visitor’s overall opinion of China positive or negative?” or “Did the visitor believe the statements of the Chinese officials?” For the encounter to be truly effective, however, it must succeed on a far more subtle level. It must implant in the guest’s mind a framework that can help him or her to make sense of news about China in a sympathetic manner long after returning from a brief trip. Lasting propaganda is about constructing a dynamic narrative, not reciting statistics. The officials who greet Arab visitors in China share with their guests—most of whom arrive with barely any knowledge of Islam in China—a perspective that helps them accept the official interpretation of China’s religious history. To understand the effectiveness of Chinese propaganda tours for Arab dignitaries requires an appreciation of how this narrative has been refined over the decades to serve the evolving needs of the Chinese state. One important example of the Chinese government’s facility at manipulating the terms of discourse about Islam in China has been its success in inducing visitors to adopt its own paradigm for classifying minority populations into fifty-six groups known as minzus. Since the introduction of the minzu system in 1954, Beijing has continually fretted that foreign audiences might not fully grasp its semantic nuances. When al-Baquri toured China in 1955, for instance, Foreign Ministry functionaries closely monitored how he reacted to conversations about minority policy and strategized about how best to clarify the details.58 Yet despite these initial concerns, most Arab visitors to China in the 1950s accepted the minzu framework without question. When they published their impressions of China in Arabic-language books or articles, many of them asserted that Chinese society was comprised of distinct “peoples” (usually translating minzu as the Arabic word sha‘b), described the criteria by which the minzus had been enumerated, and listed the names of the ten predominately Muslim nationalities.59 In the twenty-first century, Arab commentators have continued to accept the premises of Chinese minority policy, including the idea that China has exactly fifty-six “nationalities” (now

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exclusively translating minzu as the Arabic word qawmiyya).60 Perhaps most important, Arab visitors continue to repeat the official line that the Hui and the Uighurs, the two largest Muslim minzus, are distinct ethnicities that enjoy self-rule in their respective homelands of Ningxia and Xinjiang.61 For the Chinese government, which prefers for its Muslim citizens to self-identify as members of different minzus, it is helpful when foreign journalists highlight this framework. Moreover, by adopting the official Chinese discourse about minorities in China, Arab commentators allow the Chinese state to dictate the terms by which China is discussed in the Middle East and reinforce the idea that China is a multicultural society. From the moment the CCP began categorizing its minority ethnicities in 1954, it found the Hui an awkward fit for the criteria it had established. Borrowing heavily from Stalinist ideas about the origins of nations, the official policy asserted that a group of people could constitute a distinct minzu only if they lived in a particular territory, spoke a unique language, practiced the same economy, and shared a common “psychological makeup.” In accordance with Marxist doctrine, religion was not deemed a relevant factor in classifying communities. The Hui, who spoke Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, who were spread throughout China, and who were distinguished from the Han majority mainly by their commitment to Islam, defied categorization.62 The Uighurs, by contrast, matched the official criteria more easily. It is not surprising, then, that Beijing chose in October 1955 to make Xinjiang the second autonomous region (after ) set aside for “self-rule” by the members of a particular minzu. For the Chinese government, invested as it is in the minzu framework, it has always been important to present each of its minority peoples as being rooted in a particular locale. Consequently, during the mid-1950s, China’s leaders promoted Xinjiang—and especially its capital, Urumqi—as the “center” of Islam in China. Urumqi, which blossomed during the as a garrison town for the imperial army and which has always had at least a Han plurality, might have been an inappropriate choice for this lofty designation, but Arab journalists readily accepted what they were told. After al-Baquri returned from Xinjiang in May 1955, the official magazine of Egypt’s ruling Free Officers praised Urumqi as “the greatest of the capitals of Arab and Islamic culture in China,” a fanciful claim that nevertheless fit the official Chinese narrative of that era.63 In the twenty-first century, as China’s leaders worked to deflect attention from the plight of the Uighurs by highlighting the Hui, they afforded Ningxia the same prominence they once reserved for Xinjiang. When the Chinese government detached Ningxia from Gansu Province to establish an autonomous region for the Hui in 1958, it understood that only a small percentage of the Hui actually lived in the territory that was now ostensibly their minzu’s homeland. That reality did not prevent China’s leaders from elevating Ningxia to a special status, especially in their dealings with Arab visitors. It is revealing to look through the inaccurate statements Arab journalists made about the province following their returns from China. While Chinese officials may not have shared outright falsehoods with their guests, they nevertheless did little to deter them from mistaken impressions that might bolster the Chinese narrative. As a result, Arab newspapers were replete with errors about Chinese Islam. Representative articles asserted, for example, that the majority of people in Ningxia are Muslims or that most of the region’s residents greet each other in Arabic, when in fact just over a third of the province’s residents practice Islam.64 One Iraqi journalist not only claimed that Ningxia was home to a Muslim majority, but also exaggerated its significance in a national context by claiming that all Chinese Muslims are “centered” in the region.65 By emphasizing Ningxia, the legal homeland of the Hui minzu, journalists were in effect elevating the Hui above China’s other Muslim ethnicities. It is not surprising, consequently, to find Arab newspapers asserting incorrectly that most Chinese Muslims are Hui.66 Such errors persisted because it was

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not in the interest of the Chinese government to correct them: each small exaggeration of the importance of the Hui reinforced the state-sanctioned vision of Chinese Islam. Guided tours of China also ensured that Arab visitors were indoctrinated with a vision of Hui history that accentuated the community’s ties to the Middle East. Within China, the widely accepted “origin story” of the Hui holds that all members of the minzu are descended from the Arab Muslim traders who arrived in the port cities of southern China during the Tang Dynasty, adopted some Chinese customs, and married local women. Since the minzu system as a whole is predicated on an assumption of direct lineage, this narrative presents the modern Hui community as the living manifestation of historical linkages between the Chinese and Arab societies. This perspective is one that China’s leaders were eager to share and Arab visitors were generally willing to accept. The reports of Arab journalists returning from China frequently declared a sense of kinship between the Hui and their Arab cousins. For example, one Jordanian wrote approvingly that the Hui “consider themselves descendants of the Arabs who settled in China,” while a Qatari visitor slightly expanded the ethnic background of the Hui by proclaiming that they “descend from Arab and Persian origins.”67 This focus on the Middle East as the source of Chinese Islam drew attention away from the other minzus, including both the Uighurs and Kazakhs, whose members are the descendants of Turkic-speaking peoples who adopted Islam as it spread east across Central Asia. While this distinction may seem trivial, it became a significant aspect of the Chinese strategy for appealing to Arab visitors, who often proved to be emotionally invested in supporting a community with which they perceived a direct historical connection. Another way in which the Chinese government manipulated its presentation of Chinese Islam to strengthen the bond between Arab visitors and the Hui was by overemphasizing the role of the Arabic language in China. Arabic is a sensitive topic in China for reasons that, again, have to do with the fact that the Hui do not fit neatly into the minzu paradigm. One of the criteria that defines each minzu is a shared language, but the Chinese-speaking Hui have traditionally used the same language as the Han majority. Hoping to ensure that religious loyalties did not distract Muslims from their commitment to Chinese nationalism, the CCP has at various times launched vociferous campaigns to remind the Hui that they ought to consider Chinese, rather than Arabic, to be the language of their community. In March 1958, as the Great Leap Forward was beginning, a Hui scholar used the pages of the official magazine of the state-run China Islamic Association to remind the Hui that they should not feel attached to Arabic and to criticize those who asserted that schools catering to Hui youth should teach courses in the language.68 Yet while this article accurately described Beijing’s attitude toward Arabic education throughout the mid-twentieth century, Chinese officials gave quite a different impression to visiting Arabs. In May 1955, for example, al-Baquri’s watchful guides assured him that Hui students learned Arabic in state-run schools.69 The Egyptian media duly warped this statement further, informing readers that those same schools taught students to read the Qur’an and understand the history of the Middle East.70 During the relatively liberal period of the early twenty-first century before the 2018 crackdown, the Chinese government genuinely supported Arabic language learning in Hui communities (though not in state-run schools), and it continued its strategy of engaging Arab visitors by trumpeting this linguistic connection. Every trip to a language academy or encounter with a young Muslim who had studied in the Middle East echoed a long-standing tradition meant not just to flatter Arab visitors, but also to reassure them that Chinese Muslims view the Middle East as the spiritual and cultural heart of the Islamic world. The Chinese government’s need to present its Muslim citizens as part of a global Islamic community centered on the Middle East inevitably created tension with its preeminent goal of presenting Chinese Muslims as loyal

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members of the Chinese nation. Nowhere was this tension more evident than in discussions with Arab visitors about Islamic law in China. Beijing has long found itself in the delicate position of having to convince Arabs that Chinese Muslims can live according to religious principles without in any way undermining its own authority. In the 1950s, Chinese officials seem to have addressed the topic of Islamic law only vaguely, generally allowing visitors to believe whatever they wanted about the legal status of Islamic practices. The topic of polygamy was one key point of disagreement. While one Egyptian journalist reported in December 1955 that he was delighted to learn that Chinese Muslims were allowed to marry up to four times,71 more reform- minded Egyptians of the same era praised Chinese Muslims for abandoning that particular tradition.72 In the twenty-first century, Chinese officials continued to equivocate on the subject of Islamic law. Although the government did not recognize the legitimacy of Islamic institutions, it permitted some scope for them to operate in Ningxia. For example, in response to demands from the local Hui community, the state-owned Bank of Ningxia began building up an Islamic finance arm in the late 2000s with some government support and investment.73 For a brief moment in 2016, China’s state media even trumpeted a tentative arrangement to use shari‘a to resolve disputes between Muslims in Ningxia. According to that policy, Muslims in the region were supposed to seek mediation from a mullah at their local mosque before availing themselves of the secular Chinese legal system. This minor concession to Islamic law was magnified into a major story for foreign propaganda, as evidenced by the claims of China’s state-run Arabic-language media outlet that “the Muslims of the Hui nationality are interested in applying Islamic law in all aspects of their lives.”74 The seemingly outsize press coverage given to the limited opportunities for shari‘a in Ningxia reflected the Chinese government’s continual need to prove to foreign Muslims that Chinese Muslims remain connected to Islamic traditions. The official narrative about Chinese Islam was not crafted entirely in Beijing; regional and local bureaucrats, university administrators, business leaders, and ordinary citizens all helped articulate it. What is important to note, however, is that the national government was willing to elevate the Hui of Ningxia to a special status. Xinjiang and the entire Uighur minzu were all but irrelevant to the conversation. Equally irrelevant were Hui communities in other parts of China, since the standard narrative permitted no scope for diversity within the Hui minzu. Even as China’s foreign outreach came to rely increasingly on the idea that China is a multicultural society, the government was severely limiting the domestic perspectives with which foreign visitors were allowed to engage.

Since the Crackdown When the Chinese government began cracking down on expressions of Islamic piety in the spring of 2018, much of the infrastructure that had been built up to host Middle Eastern visitors was hastily dismantled. Beijing’s entire outreach strategy had been based on the premise that the Hui could be trusted as the public face of Chinese Islam, but now the injunction to “Sinicize” Islam was being applied to all the Muslim minzus. In Ningxia, the new attitude transformed the very architecture of the city. Just a few years after their installation, the city’s Arabic-language street signs were pulled down. Regional officials commanded restaurant owners to remove any window decals advertising halal food in Arabic letters; instead, they were instructed to display a new logo the government had designed using the Chinese translation, qingzhen. Architects released guidelines for how to refashion Middle Eastern–style domes into new edifices inspired by traditional Chinese pagodas. And some of the local backers of the Hui Culture Park, who had helped build one of the main destinations for state-sponsored tours, anonymously told a Hong Kong–based journalist that they were being pressured to make the park appear less Middle Eastern.75

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These changes have brought an abrupt end to China’s long-standing strategy, dating back to the 1950s, of trying to convince Arab visitors that Chinese Muslims are well versed in the Arabic language and Middle Eastern culture. The main reason for putting Yinchuan on the standard itinerary was to awe visitors with a sense of familiarity; with the architectural changes continuing to take place throughout the city, it has lost its special status. Instead, if the Chinese government wishes to highlight China’s connections to the Middle East, it must rely on non-Muslims who have studied Arabic at the country’s elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai. Those programs, which have expanded in recent years, generally train Han students, for whom Arabic is often not their first choice of language to study. Many Arabic majors at Peking University, for example, report that they indicated an interest in studying modern languages, but did not do well enough on their college entrance examinations to pursue the preferred options of English or other Western European languages.76 Currently, the Chinese government trusts these students and older graduates of the same programs to be the public face of its outreach, instead of the Hui Muslims of Ningxia, who until recently played the central role. But the aggressive transformation of Islamic public space in China does leave some relevance for Yinchuan in Chinese propaganda. As the government destroys or renovates mosques that were built in a Middle Eastern style, it points to mosques in the traditional Chinese style as symbols of the campaign to Sinicize Islam. As a result, the Najiahu Mosque, as the grandest and most historic Chinese-style mosque in Ningxia, is still worth celebrating. In December 2018, the Chinese government placed the Niajiahu Mosque on a list of fifteen religious sites (Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, and Islamic) that best exemplified religion “with Chinese characteristics.”77 The Najiahu Mosque is one of several mosques on the list, but it is the only one located in what is ostensibly an autonomous region for a Muslim minzu. Today, for the few Arab visitors who still come to Yinchuan, the Najiahu Mosque is the only significant Islamic site to make their itinerary. A case in point involves the festivities surrounding the China–Arab States Cooperation Forum, which was held in Beijing, rather than Yinchuan, in July 2018. Nevertheless, some of the Arab journalists covering the conference were brought to Yinchuan, and at least two Arabic-language newspapers—one from Egypt and the other from the United Arab Emirates—published articles about the city.78 In both articles, the only Islamic site to earn a mention was the Nijiahu Mosque (although one of the articles seems to have referred to it incorrectly as the Nanguan Mosque, the name of a different mosque in Yinchuan). While both authors celebrated the supposed interest of Yinchuan residents in learning Arabic, the mosque’s imam apparently now speaks to visitors only in Chinese. As news of China’s detention of up to one million Uighurs spreads, however, Ningxia has inevitably been overshadowed by Xinjiang. The Chinese government has found that it cannot keep bringing foreign Muslims to Yinchuan while simply playing down any news from further west. And so, perhaps reluctantly, it has begun to bring foreign delegations to Xinjiang to tour the reeducation camps. The goal seems not to be to win over skeptical Muslims, but rather to appeal to the governments of other authoritarian countries. For example, Chinese state media made much of a visit by diplomats from eight countries—Belarus, Cambodia, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, , Senegal, and Venezuela—to Xinjiang in February 2019. In addition to speaking with “trainees at vocational education and training centers” (Orwellian language referring to inmates at detention centers), the delegates attended an exhibition of photographs from alleged terrorist attacks on Chinese civilians.79 In such a circumstance, Egypt is a valuable ally for China because it is an Islamic country whose government is also using the vocabulary of “terrorism” to justify a crackdown against domestic opponents, and thus Egyptian diplomats are especially willing to accept the Chinese government’s claims at face value

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and to bristle at any notion of foreign interference in China’s domestic affairs. The Egyptian diplomats in delegations such as this one do not seem to be offered tours that differ from those given to non-Muslims. The idea of taking foreigners to tour prisons has a long history in China. This strategy has its roots in the Soviet Union, which faced a constant stream of criticism about its Siberian gulags and, as a result, set aside a few model prisons with reliably humane conditions to show to foreign visitors.80 China’s controversial “reeducation through labor” scheme also attracted foreign scrutiny, including in the Middle East, and, consequently, it was routine in the 1950s for Arab visitors to tour model prisons in China.81 Today, facing foreign criticism of its detention policies in Xinjiang, which it continues to present as efforts at “reeducation,” Beijing has revived this strategy. Chinese officials select journalists from pliable Islamic countries and shepherd them to model camps in several of Xinjiang’s main cities, including Kashgar and Hotan. While the idea of taking foreign visitors that far west is new, what is remarkable is how little the basic premise of Chinese outreach has changed, even at a time of much greater repression and heightened foreign sensitivity. As always, the goal of Chinese officials is to convince their guests that China is a unified and multiethnic country and that the Chinese government has the best interests of its Muslim population at heart. Beijing’s remarkable success at promoting this vision of China was exemplified by a January–February 2019 press junket of Egyptian journalists, including reporters from the newspapers Al-Ahram and Al-Gomhuria and from Nile TV. “By visiting several vocational training and qualification centers in Hotan and Kashgar,” read the summary of the visit in Al-Ahram a few weeks later, “it is possible to say that there is a complete difference from what is published in some Western media outlets.” The author raved that the Chinese government pays for Xinjiang’s mullahs to pursue religious training at centers of Islamic learning within China (without mentioning that those schools are controlled by the state) and praised the Chinese constitution for guaranteeing religious freedom. “China has succeeded in achieving peaceful co-existence among people of its different religions and nationalities,” he proclaimed.82 China’s sophisticated international media operation repeated these judgments beneath a photograph of an Al-Gomhuria reporter posing with Uighur children. “The conditions here are very good,” that reporter was quoted as saying, adding, “I could feel that local Muslims fully enjoy religious freedom.”83 Despite the abrupt changes in China’s attitude toward Islam, China’s Islamic outreach has actually remained much the same. Beijing still tries to prove that the CCP has brought stability, development, and harmony to its Muslim citizens, and it is still eager to employ trusted Chinese Muslims to make that point. The Chinese government has begun to play down the links between Chinese Muslims and the Middle East, which it took pains to emphasize in both the 1950s and the 2010s, but it still tries to win favor by presenting Islam as indigenous to China. Now, as in the past, China’s leaders know that they cannot have productive relationships with Islamic countries unless they dispel fears about China’s treatment of its own Muslim population. With the benefit of seventy years of refinement, China’s Islamic outreach remains a crucial part of the country’s foreign policy.

Can China’s Arab Outreach Be Successful? It is impossible to evaluate systematically whether Chinese propaganda tours are an effective tool with which to shape public attitudes toward China in the Arab world. After all, the number of individuals able to participate in such tours is relatively small, and ordinary Arabs may form opinions about China based on innumerable other factors far beyond Beijing’s control. Yet it is certain that, by bringing to China influential Arabs, including many journalists, the Chinese government has ensured a steady stream of articles in the Arab media that portray China in a positive light. The Chinese government has proven remarkably adept

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at directing attention toward locations and events that it has carefully selected. The effectiveness of this approach must be interpreted as a major propaganda victory because it so thoroughly distracts global audiences from religious and ethnic conflict in Xinjiang. The most lasting impact of China’s foreign outreach strategy, however, may ultimately prove to be its success in dictating the framework through which Islam in China is discussed in the Middle East. As foreign intellectuals adopt the premises of the minzu paradigm and repeat Chinese assertions about the history and geography of Chinese Islam, China’s minority policy gains legitimacy—both at home and abroad. There is, however, a notable limit to China’s ability to control the vocabulary of the international conversation. A simple search on Twitter for the standard Arabic transliteration of “Xinjiang” reveals the problem. News articles by sympathetic Arab journalists, amplified by China’s own Arabic- language news networks, dominate the results, suggesting that Beijing is effectively setting the terms of the discourse. But a separate Arabic-language conversation, which is far more critical in tone, takes place in parallel among people who choose instead to refer to China’s northwestern region as “Eastern Turkestan.” Since no Chinese official would ever use this term, Chinese propaganda has no direct influence over the conversation. Discussions of Islam in China are segregated, and Beijing tends to prefer to engage only with interlocutors who are already sympathetic to its position. Fortunately for China, it seems likely that more and more Arab commentators will see it as a symbol of the kind of stable, orderly society to which Middle Eastern countries might aspire. It is already possible to find some instances in which Arabs who have been to China have forthrightly advocated that the Chinese model be adopted in the Middle East. One of the most explicit calls to emulate China came from a Yemeni journalist who toured Yinchuan. Having listened to a lecture from the imam of the Najiahu Mosque about , he praised the Chinese government for providing services to its Muslim citizens and lauded the spirit of “affection and tolerance governed by love, understanding, and harmony” between members of different ethnicities who were “united by the bond of nation.” Mindful of his own country’s divisions, he mused that, “if that [spirit] formed in Yemen and the Arab world, then the problems and conflicts would vanish and all Arab societies would make progress.”84 In an era in which authoritarian nationalism is taking deeper root around the globe, comments such as this one reveal how well China is positioned to claim a mantle of ideological leadership. One by one, Arab visitors who tour Beijing, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and elsewhere encounter a version of China that has been meticulously calibrated to promote this goal. More often than not, they then return home ready to share what they have seen in exactly the manner their hosts intended.

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Endnotes

(1) “China: ‘Where Are They?’: Time for Answers about Mass Detentions in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,” Amnesty International, 2018. (2) Julia Bowie and David Gitter, “The CCP’s Plan to ‘Sinicize’ Religions,” Diplomat, June 14, 2018. (3) Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin, “Inside China’s Audacious Global Propaganda Campaign,” Guardian, December 7, 2018; Anne-Marie Brady, “Magic Weapons: China’s Political Influence Activities under Xi Jinping,” Wilson Center, September 2017; Koh Gui Qing and John Shiffman, “Beijing’s Covert Radio Network Airs China-Friendly News across Washington, and the World,” , November 2, 2015; Jack Hazlewood, “China Spends Big on Propaganda in Britain . . . But Returns Are Low,” Hong Kong Free Press, April 3, 2016; Carolyn Kenney, Max Bergmann, and James Lamond, “Understanding and Combating Russian and Chinese Influence Operations,” Center for American Progress, February 2019. (4) Deirdre Shesgreen and John Fritze, “Trump Accuses China of Meddling in U.S. Midterm Elections, Cites Des Moines Register Advertisement,” Des Moines Register, September 26, 2018. (5) “Main Speech by Premier Chou En-Lai, Head of the Delegation of the People’s Republic of China, Distributed at the Plenary Session of the Asian-African Conference” and “Supplementary Speech by Premier Chou En-Lai at the Plenary Session of the Asian-African Conference,” both in China and the Asian-African Conference (Documents) (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1955). Zhou reiterated his willingness to host foreign visitors and specifically extended invitations to citizens of five Southeast Asian countries in his comments during a closed-door session in Bandung. See the minutes of the heads of delegations meeting at the Asian-African Conference, April 20–24, 1955, 207-00048-01, Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives (henceforth CFMA). (6) Herbert Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy (: Praeger, 1962), 2. (7) Richard Walker, “Guided Tourism in China,” Problems of Communism 6 (1957); Herbert Passin, China’s Cultural Diplomacy, chap. 1; Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), chaps. 7–8. (8) Richard Walker, China under Communism: The First Five Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955), 243–245; Margaret Fisher and Joan Bondurant, “The Impact of Communist China on Visitors from India,” Far Eastern Quarterly 15 (1956); William Ratliff, “Chinese Communist Cultural Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1949–1960,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (1969). (9) Anne-Marie Brady, “‘Treat Insiders and Outsiders Differently’: The Use and Control of Foreigners in the PRC,” China Quarterly 164 (2000); Anne-Marie Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003); Julia Lovell, “The Uses of Foreigners in Mao-Era China: Techniques of Hospitality and International Image-Building in the People’s Republic, 1949–1976,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (2015). (10) Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Tom Buchanan, East Wind: China and the British Left, 1925–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chap. 5; Matthew Johnson, “From Peace to the Panthers: PRC Engagement with African- American Transnational Networks, 1949–1979,” Past and Present 218 (2013); Robeson Taj Frazier, The East Is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). (11) Peter Schmid, “Report from Red China I—The Sparrows’ Fall,” Reporter, July 12, 1956, 27–29. (12) James Cameron, Mandarin Red (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1955), 113. (13) Lovell, “The Uses of Foreigners in Mao-Era China,” 145. (14) Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 92. (15) Robert Loh and Humphrey Evans, Escape from Red China (New York: Coward- McCann, 1962), 160. (16) Ministry of Culture to the Foreign Ministry, May 8, 1955, 107-00072-02, CFMA. (17) Walker, “Guided Tourism in China,” 32–33. (18) Walker, China under Communism, 244–245. (19) Walker, “Guided Tourism in China,” 35. (20) Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 94. Avowed Arab communists, such as Lebanese Communist Party member George Hanna, were especially likely to choose to travel to China by way of the Soviet Union. See George Hanna, Kuntu fi saybiriya wa-l-sin [I was in Siberia and China] (: Dar al-‘ilm li-l- malayin, 1957).

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(21) For an example of a Sudanese student who entered China from the Soviet Union as part of a WFDY delegation and then published a memoir about that experience, see ‘Abdallah ‘Ubayd, Sudani fi al-sin al-sha‘biyya [A Sudanese in People’s China] (: Dar al-fikr, 1956). For an example of a Lebanese student who traveled to from Moscow to China by train as part of a youth delegation with an unspecified organization, see ‘Abd al-Salam al-Adhami, Al-Sin al-jadida fi zall al-ishtirakiyya [New China in the shadow of socialism] (Beirut: Dar al-‘ilm li-l- mala’yin, 1954). (22) For background on the ties between the anti-imperialist movements in Algeria and North Vietnam, see Robert Malley, The Call from Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), chap. 2. For an example of a memoir by an Algerian who traveled to the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam in succession, see Si Azzedine (Rabah Zerari), On nous appelait fellaghas [We were called Fellaghas] (: Éditions Stock, 1976). (23) Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri, Baqaya dhikrayat [The remains of memories] (Cairo: Markaz al-ahram li-l-tarjamah wa-l-nashr, mu’assasat al-ahram, 1988), 175. (24) Abu Saeed Enver, “A Pakistani in Sinkiang,” China Reconstructs, August 1956, 21. A few non-Muslims also visited Xinjiang in the same era, including the New Zealand photographer Tom Hutchins and the British journalist David Chipp, a Reuters correspondent based in Beijing. In 1956, Hutchins and Chipp traveled together to Urumqi and Hami, a smaller city where a much higher percentage of the residents were ethnically Uighur. See Tom Hutchins, “Red China on the March,” Life, January 21, 1956, 107–115; John Turner, “Tom Hutchins: Urumchi, Sinkiang 1956,” http://jbt.photoshelter.com/portfolio/G0000UnJRhrE99q0. (25) Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri, Baqaya dhikrayat, 175, 177–178. Note that al-Baquri described the Huaisheng Mosque in detail, but erroneously placed it in Beijing. (26) ‘Ubayd, Sudani fi al-sin al-sha‘biyya, 89. (27) ‘Ali Hamdi al-Jamal, Al-‘Imlaq al-asfar [The yellow giant] (Cairo: Al-Matba‘a al-‘alimiyya, 1956), 73. (28) “Zhongguo yisilanjiao jingxueyuan he huimin xueyuan jihui huanying bulaxin jiafa he adefu dani’er” [A gathering of the China Islamic Institute and the Hui People’s School welcomes Brahim Ghafa and Atif Daniyal],” Renmin ribao, 1 April 1958, 4. (29) Transcript of Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri’s conversations, 25 May 1955, 107-00007- 04, CFMA.

(30) Brady, Making the Foreign Serve China, 93.

(31) David Chipp, “The Day I Stepped on Mao’s Toes,” in Frontlines: Snapshots of History, ed. Nicholas Moore and Sidney Weiland (London: Pearson Education, 2001), 66.

(32) Isma‘il al-Habruk, “Isma‘il al-habruk yaktub min al-sin al-sha‘biyya” [Isma‘il al- Habruk writes from People’s China], Ruz al-yusuf 1440 (January 16, 1956), 10–11.

(33) “Juxing aerjiliya zhou juti taohua” [Concrete plan for implementing Support Algeria Week], 29 March 29, 1959, 107-00360-05, CFMA.

(34) Alaba Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy in Africa, 1958–71 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 25–26; Mon’im Nasser-Eddine, Arab-Chinese Relations, 1950–1971: With Special Emphasis on Egyptian-Chinese Relations (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1972), 226.

(35) Al-Adhami, Al-Sin al-jadida fi zall al-ishtirakiyya, 122–123.

(36) See, for example, Cameron, Mandarin Red, 32–33.

(37) Al-Adhami, Al-Sin al-jadida fi zall al-ishtirakiyya, 159–160.

(38) Al-Jamal, Al-‘Imlaq al-asfar, 64.

(39) See, for example, Mahmud al-Shanawani, Ahlan bikin [Welcome to Beijing] (Giza, Egypt: Dar al-Safsafa, 2015).

(40) For more on the Middle Eastern expatriate community in Yiwu, see Daniel Bardsley, “Yiwu Is the ‘Fastest Growing Muslim Community in China,” National, August 12, 2012. In addition to Arabs, Yiwu is home to a significant Kurdish community.

(41) Other projects in Yinchuan were documented in Kyle Haddad-Fonda, “If China Builds It, Will the Arab World Come?” ChinaFile, May 5, 2016, https://www. chinafile.com/postcard/if-china-builds-it-will-arab-world-come.

(42) Yang Liu, “Xingzou zai saishang jiangnan” [Walking the “frontier Jiangnan”], Ningxia lüyou [Ningxia tourism], spring 2015, 6.

(43) “Bad’ rihlat ‘kun min al-mutafawwiqin’ min al-sin” [The beginning of the journey of the “be among the outstanding” group to China], Al-Watan, January 11, 2016.

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(44) See, for example, Liu Hui, “Ningxia tas‘a li-talbiyat ihtiyajat al-sin wa-misr” [Ningxia is seeking to meet the needs of China and Egypt], Al-Ahram, May 30, 2016.

(45) Haddad-Fonda, “If China Builds It, Will the Arab World Come?”

(46) “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya” [Ningxia is the Arab gateway of China], Al- Dawha 82 (August 2014).

(47) Sefta Leïla, “Chine . . . Un développement harmonieux internationnal” [China . . . a harmonious international development], Le Maghreb, June 29, 2014.

(48) For reports by Arab visitors who have been taken to Wuzhong, see Samir Khayr Ahmad, “Muslimu al-sin: kayf yafhamununa?” [Muslims of China: How do they understand us?], Al-‘Arabi, November 30, 2015; ‘Abd al-Zahra Muhammad al- Handawi, “Muqata‘at Ningxia al-siniyya . . . ghalibiyyat sukkaniha muslimun wa-yuhibbun al-tabarruk bi-l-‘arab” [The Chinese province of Ningxia . . . the majority of its residents are Muslims and they like blessings from Arabs], Al- Sabah al-, June 9, 2015.

(49) Dru Gladney, Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Council on East Asian Studies, 1996), 136.

(50) “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya”; Salih al-Khawalda, “Iqbal mutaza’id ‘ala al-lugha al-‘arabiyya fi Ningxia al-siniyya” [A growing appetite for the Arabic language in Ningxia, China], (PETRA), June 16, 2014.

(51) ‘Ali al-Khayl, “Ningxia . . . sallat al-sin al-ghidha’iyya wa-madinat al-tanawwu‘ al- thaqafi . . . wa-nuqtat al-bidaya li-tariq al-harir al-jadid!” [Ningxia . . . breadbasket of China and city of cultural diversity . . . and the beginning point of the new Silk Road!], Saba Net, October 7, 2014, http://sabanews.net/ar/print370779.htm; Nihal al-Sharif, “Ma’adhin al-sin tasdah allahu akbar” [The minarets of China chant God is great], Ahwal misr, June 10, 2015; “Talibat ‘kun min al-mutafawwiqin’ yazurna masjid tarikhi fi muqata‘at Ningxia” [The students of “be among the excellent” visit a historical mosque in the region of Ningxia], Al-Ray, January 15, 2016; “Ahmad bin Sa‘id yatajawwal fi bawabat al-sin ma‘ al-duwal al-‘arabiyya” [Ahmad bin Sa‘id wanders in the gateway of China with the Arab countries], Al-Iqtisadi, June 5, 2016; Leïla, “Chine . . . Un développement harmonieux international.”

(52) See “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya.”

(53) The author of this report watched her perform “Zahrat al-Mada’in” at a party organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries in (delayed) observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People in Beijing in December 2013. (54) “Iqbal mutazayid ‘ala al-‘arabiyya fi Ningxia al-siniyya” [An increasing demand for the Arabic language in Chinese Ningxia], Jordan News Agency (PETRA), June 16, 2014. (55) “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya.” (56) For example, the chairman of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs recalled that his schedule during a visit to China included conversations about Middle Eastern politics with academics at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing and a conference titled “Twenty-First-Century China and the World” at the Shanghai Institute of Strategic Studies. See Mohamed Shaker, “Wo suo jiandao de zhongguo: yiwei fangwenzhe de yinxiang” [The China that I saw: The impressions of one visitor], in Muhammad Nu‘man Jalal, ed., Aijiren yan zhong de zhongguo [China through Egyptian eyes], trans. Wang Youyong (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2006), 57. (57) Robert Guillain, “600 millions de Chinois dans l’engrenage communiste” [600 million Chinese in the communist machine], Le Monde, January 18, 1956, 1. (58) Transcript of Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri’s conversations, May 25, 1955, 107-00007- 04, CFMA. (59) Muhammad al-Bili, “Awwal tahqiq misri ‘an al-sin al-sha‘biyya!” [The first Egyptian investigation of people’s China!], Ruz al-yusuf 1435 (December 12, 1955); al-Jamal, Al-‘Imlaq al-asfar, 69; al-Adhami, Al-Sin al-jadida fi zall al-ishtirakiyya, 48. (60) ‘Abd al-Razzaq Bani Hani, “Rihlati ila al-sin . . . ru’ya jadida” [My journey to China . . . a new view],” Jo24, August 10, 2015. (61) “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya.” (62) Kevin Caffrey, “Who ‘Who’ Is, and Other Local Poetics of National Policy: Minzu Shibie and the Hui in the Process,” China Information 18 (2004). (63) “Al-tahrir ma‘a al-baquri fi al-sin al-sha‘biyya” [Al-Tahrir with al-Baquri in People’s China], Majallat al-tahrir, May 21, 1955, 16–17. (64) Ahmad, “Muslimu al-sin: kayf yafhamununa?”; “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al- ‘arabiyya.” For statistics on Muslim populations in each Chinese province, see Min Junqing, “The Present Situation and Characteristics of Contemporary Islam in China,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Study of Monotheistic Religions 8 (2010).

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(65) Al-Handawi, “Muqata‘at Ningxia al-siniyya.” (66) Shadi Subhi, “Al-Muslimun hawla al-‘alim: muslimu al-sin ‘ala tariq al-harir” [Muslims around the world: The Muslims of China on the Silk Road], Al-Masri al-yawm, 30 June 30, 2016. (67) Ahmad, “Muslimu al-sin: kayf yafhamununa?”; “Ningxia bawabat al-sin al-‘arabiyya.” (68) Ma Feilong, “Gedi yisilanjiao jie jinxing shehuizhuyi da bianlun, shenru fan you douzheng” [The entire Islamic community is carrying out a big debate about socialism and thoroughly engaging in the anti-rightist struggle], Zhongguo musilin, March 1958, 7–8. (69) Summary of Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri and Mustafa Kamil’s visit, May 1955, 107- 00007-03, CFMA. (70) “Ma rahu al-baquri fi al-sin al-shaʿbiyya” [What al-Baquri saw in People’s China], Majallat al-tahrir, July 19, 1955. (71) Al-Bili, “Awwal tahqiq misri ‘an al-sin al-sha‘biyya!” (72) Al-Jamal, Al-‘Imlaq al-asfar, 72. A French journalist stationed in Cairo also reported that al-Baquri praised Chinese Muslims for understanding that the Qur’an did not condone polygamy; see Jean Lacouture, Egypt in Transition, trans. Francis Scarfe (London: Methuen, 1958), 229. (73) Matthew Erie, “Sharia, Charity, and Minjian Autonomy in Muslim China: Gift Giving in a Plural World,” American Ethnologist 43 (2016). (74) “Thaqafat al-ma’ida ‘ind qawmiyyat Hui al-muslima” [The culture of the table for the Muslim Hui nationality], People’s Daily Online, May 5, 2015, http://arabic. people.com.cn/n/2015/0505/c31657-8887358.html. (75) Nectar Gan, “How China Is Trying to Impose Islam with Chinese Characteristics in the Hui Muslim Heartland,” South China Morning Post, May 14, 2018. (76) Personal conversations at Peking University, July 2018. (77) Liu Xin, “Chinese-Style Religious Sites Lauded as Examples of Sinicization of Beliefs,” Global Times, December 18, 2018. (78) ‘Umar al-Ahmad, “Ningxia tajribah siniyyah fi sun‘ al-mustahil” [Ningxia is a Chinese experience in making the impossible], Al-Ittihad, July 22, 2018; Hisham Mubarak, “Ningxia . . . tinnin sini ‘ala al-tariqah al-islamiyyah” [Ningxia . . . a Chinese dragon in the Islamic manner], Akhbar al-yawm, July 27, 2018. (79) “Diplomats from Eight Countries Visit Xinjiang,” China Daily, February 27, 2019. (80) Jeffrey Hardy, “Gulag Tourism: Khrushchev’s ‘Show’ Prisons in the Cold War Context, 1954–59,” Russian Review 71 (2012). (81) Al-Adhami, Al-Sin al-jadida fi zall al-ishtirakiyya; al-Jamal, Al-‘Imlaq al-asfar; ‘Ubayd, Sudani fi al-sin al-sha‘biyya. (82) ‘Adil ‘Ali, “Fi Xinjiang al-siniyyah, mukafahat al-arhab wa-muharabat al-faqr wa- tahqiq al-istiqrar wa-l-tanmiyah” [In Chinese Xinjiang, combating terrorism and fighting poverty and achieving stability and development], Al-Ahram, February 27, 2019. (83) “Egyptian Media Note Xinjiang’s Stability,” China Daily, February 2, 2019. (84) Al-Khayl, “Ningxia . . . sallat al-sin al-ghidha’iyya wa-madinat al-tanawwu‘ al- thaqafi . . . wa-nuqtat al-bidaya li-tariq al-harir al-jadid!”

45 46 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019

About the Author

Kyle Haddad-Fonda is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Association and a producer for its PBS television show, Great Decisions. He also teaches history at the University of Washington. He holds a doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His writings about China’s relations with the Middle East have appeared in such publications as ChinaFile, Foreign Policy, and World Politics Review. His first book, a history of China’s interactions with Egypt and Algeria during the 1950s and 1960s, is expected to be published in 2020.

King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)

The KFCRIS is an independent non-governmental institution based in Riyadh, the Kingdom of . The Center was founded in 1403/1983 by the King Faisal Foundation (KFF) to preserve the legacy of the late King Faisal and to continue his mission of transmitting knowledge between the Kingdom and the world. The Center serves as a platform for research and Islamic Studies, bringing together researchers and research institutions from the Kingdom and across the world through conferences, workshops, and lectures, and through the production and publication of scholarly works, as well as the preservation of Islamic manuscripts. The Center’s Research Department is home to a group of established and promising researchers who endeavor to produce in-depth analyses in various fields, ranging from Contemporary Political Thought, Political Economy, and Arabic Language to Saudi Studies, Maghreb Studies, and Asian Studies. The Center also hosts the Library which preserves invaluable Islamic manuscripts, the Al-Faisal Museum for Arab , the Al-Faisal Institute for Human Resources Development, the Darat Al-Faisal, and the Al-Faisal Cultural Press, which issues the Al-Faisal magazine and other key intellectual periodicals. For more information, please visit the Center’s website: www.kfcris.com/en

P.O.Box 51049 Riyadh 11543 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Tel: (+966 11) 4652255 Ext: 6892 Fax: (+966 11) 4659993 E-mail: [email protected]