We have been talking and reading about the "new Silk Road" for several years now, and I must admit I had been getting rather bored with the whole concept.
Ever since I first visited China in 2005, I was convinced the world was tilting westwards.
Of course economic power is flowing from the West to the East; of course the Gulf will tend to look to Shanghai, rather than New York, especially after the 2008 financial crisis; and of course the growth of Chinese economic power was so inexorable that the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, would have had to take notice of it.
All these facts have been so obvious for a long time, at least for the five years that I've been in the Gulf, that I had almost forgotten them. But at a conference in Dubai yesterday, the nebulous Silk Road concept was made much more relevant.
I came away believing it certainly does exist, and will be of crucial importance for economists, financiers and business executives over the next decade and beyond.
The gathering was organised by HSBC (which knows a thing or two about China) and Gulf Intelligence, on the theme of "China: what next?"
The attendees were bankers, financiers and importers-exporters across the whole spectrum of sectors. I was sitting between a senior executive of Spinneys, a UAE retailer that imports a lot from Asia, and a manager from the giant Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
We learnt of the recent five-year economic plan announced by the Chinese government, which aims to double salaries, put in place a universal pension scheme and build millions of apartments.
This expansion is part of the development that will make China the biggest economy in the world sometime in the next couple of decades, replacing the US.
China will try to do it with one eye on the environmental effects of such rapid expansion, and with another on the bogeyman of inflation, almost as much an obsession for the Chinese as it is for the Germans. GDP growth, running at double figures almost every year this millennium, will be trimmed to about 7 per cent.
Along with this economic growth goes a burgeoning financial power. China has US$3 trillion (Dh11.01tn) of financial reserves and has seized the attention of American politicians and strategists by taking a commanding position in the immense public debt of the US.
My own table focused on the increasingly global role of the yuan, the Chinese currency, which has been the focus of some hard controversy since the financial crisis. Despite recent "soft" appreciation of the yuan, some of the bankers thought it still had 40 per cent to rise in the near future. Such a degree of appreciation would inevitably cause a radical restructuring of the global financial system.
We were asked specifically whether the peg between many Gulf currencies and the US dollar could, or should, survive such a major realignment, and the response was an overwhelming vote in favour of de-pegging the greenback from its current status.
The peg was a relic of the past, the delegates said, and the dollar's favoured position did not reflect present economic reality. Sympathy for the yuan was also evident, with much applause for the way the Chinese economy had dragged the rest of the world out of recession in 2009.
The consensus was that the dollar-dirham peg should go, to be replaced by linking the UAE currency with a weighted basket of currencies including the dollar, the euro and the yuan.
We even came up with the novel idea of re-weighting this peg on a regular basis to reflect changing patterns of trade with the major partners. Given China's rising importance as a UAE trade partner, this would have the inevitable consequence of linking the dirham more closely to the yuan.
This was only one example of the ties that would draw the Gulf and China closer together. Other areas included energy, clean-power technology, construction and transport. Tourism and leisure were also represented, with Jumeirah's planned opening of six hotels in China cited as an example of Dubai's enthusiasm for the country and its huge internal market potential.
Of course, China's rise will not be 100 per cent trouble-free. Some attendees thought the authoritarian, top-down control of the Chinese political system would remain for a long time, and might even act as a brake on economic progress. And there are social and demographic issues the country needs to face, too.
But the new Silk Road is alive and well, and the UAE is keen to tread it.
