Following is a guest entry by Beijing-based journalist Mu Chunshan on China’s Middle East policy.

At the start of September, as the leaders of the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt and Jordan were arriving in Washington for talks with US President Barack Obama, officials in China had just seen off North Korean leader Kim Jong-il after his second trip to China in less than a year.

On the surface, the two sets of talks might appear to be two very different diplomatic matters. But in China, both incidents were treated in much the same way—with an effective media blackout.

For Kim’s visit, the media blackout was mandatory, with Chinese officials only confirming his visit after he had already left the country. But the absence of coverage on the Middle East peace talks was self-imposed. Why? Because the Chinese public just wasn’t very interested.

China has always prided itself on a ‘more work, less talk’ approach to its ‘quiet’ diplomacy, placing economic considerations above political ones. And this has been no more evident than with its approach to the Middle East.

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Last night I was invited to appear as a guest on CCTV’s World Insight current affairs show along with John Seaman, a research fellow with the French Institute of International Relations in Paris and Prof. Huo Deming of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University.

The subject we were discussing was the importance of rare earth metals and particularly the ongoing debate over China’s recent moves to limit exports of these elements, which are crucial to a range of day-to-day electronic devices like cell phones and laptops as well as defence systems such as radar and missile guidance systems.

China currently supplies more than 95 percent of the world’s output of these 17 metals, despite only having about a third of the world’s reserves. This hadn’t really seemed like a big issue to most commentators until China decided to halt exports to Japan at the height of the spat in September over a detained Chinese trawler captain.

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An interesting comment from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg over the weekend in a conversation he had with the Wall Street Journal during his trip to Hong Kong.

The message to his fellow Americans, in short: Stop blaming the Chinese for everything.

‘If you look at the US, you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,’ he was quoted as saying. ‘I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here…only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.’

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Meeting with the Dalai Lama can be fraught with political difficulties—just ask EU leaders, who in 2008 saw annual China-EU talks shelved for the first time in 11 years after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with him.

But it seems there’s also a financial cost for meeting the Tibetan spiritual leader, at least according to a recent study published by the Social Science Research Network.

According to the authors, both from the University of Goettingen in Germany,‘Our empirical results support the idea that countries officially receiving the Dalai Lama at the highest political level are punished through a reduction of their exports to China.’

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Last month I wrote an entry entitled ‘The Dangers of China Bashing’ focusing on a candidate for the US Senate (an unsuccessful one, thankfully) who claimed to have classified information showing that China had a ‘strategic plan to take over America’.

The claim by Christine O’Donnell was made in 2006, when she was debating other Republicans for the party’s nomination. Although her denial that she was a witch in one of her campaign ads seemed to strike a final nail into the coffin of her chances, she was by no means alone in trying to whip up fear of China to bolster her candidacy.

Indeed, writing late last month in the New Yorker ahead of yesterday’s Congressional midterm elections, Andrew Osnos argued: ‘Red-China-baiting hasn’t reached such rhetorical splendour in US politics since, perhaps, 1882, when Congress passed the first American law to bar a group based on its national origin—The Chinese Exclusion Act—after anti-Chinese riots against the “yellow peril.”’

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In his book The China Dream, Joe Studwell chronicled the ambitions and delusions of foreign entrepreneurs scrambling to get into China. The absolute article of faith was that if only one in every hundred Chinese bought a razor, that this would still be a hell of a lot of razors sold.

Today’s China gold rush is in education. In his book The Rise and Decline of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy pointed out that historically, the Chinese have spent their capital either on land or in education. And, as a Beijing public school official, I can confirm from experience that Chinese parents will sacrifice everything for their child’s education.

It’s something US colleges and high schools have discovered to their delight, with at least 100,000 Chinese students currently enrolled in the United States, many of whom are paying around $50,000 a year for the privilege. That’s probably why the US embassy in Beijing seems keen to rush through student visa applications, and why Chinese education fairs draw so many foreign participants.

The announcement by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung that his country will re-open the Cam Ranh Bay port to foreign navies presumably won’t have amused Chinese officials.

Speaking Saturday following the conclusion of the 17th ASEAN summit over the weekend, he said, ‘In the centre of the Cam Ranh port complex, Vietnam will stand ready to provide services to the naval ships from all countries including submarines when they need our services.’

The summit was dominated by discussions over China’s various territorial disputes, and the Vietnamese announcement over the port is almost certainly in part a response to growing concerns over China’s increasing assertiveness and willingness to making sweeping territorial claims in the South China Sea region.

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The first thing any government needs to do before it can realistically draw up effective domestic policies is presumably to know who exactly these policies are being developed for. The first step toward knowing this is to find out a little about the public, which is where China’s latest census comes in.

Beginning today, Chinese officials, backed by a team of 6.5 million census takers, are undertaking a 10-day population count of its about 1.3 billion population—the largest-ever census in history. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the 10-day core survey will be followed by another, smaller, round of almost three weeks of census taking, with statistics to be calculated in December and released publicly in April 2011.

If this timetable can be followed, the census—the sixth for the People’s Republic of China—will appear a model of efficiency compared with India’s two-phased but slightly smaller headcount, which began in April and is expected to take a year to calculate.

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As I mentioned ahead of the Communist Party Central Committee plenary session earlier this month, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made a much talked about speech in August in the booming southern city of Shenzhen in which he suggested that China’s economic reforms would fail without political reforms.

The remarks set off a flurry of speculation about a struggle between reformers led by Wen and more conservative elements in the leadership, and since then (even more than usual) every opinion piece that appears in the People’s Daily has been pored over by China watchers looking for clues on where exactly the leadership stands.

According to Beijing-based analyst Russell Leigh Moses, the response has been clear. He says that those intent on ‘deflecting discussion’ of reform were the clear winners at the plenary session, and he notes the vehement attacks that have followed on reformist elements of the party in the People’s Daily.

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Following is a guest entry by The Diplomat contributor and Iran analyst Meir Javedanfar, who looks at the implications for China of its policy toward Iran.

The recent Washington Post report that Chinese companies are breaking UN sanctions by selling equipment to Iran for its nuclear and missile programme sent shockwaves through the international community.

According to the article, the equipment sold includes high-quality carbon fibre that Iran started to use around four years ago to improve the performance of its centrifuges and missile production, and it therefore seems extremely unlikely that the Chinese government wouldn't have been aware of such dealings by Chinese companies.

As an emerging superpower, China has been actively involved in spreading its economic, and in some cases military, influence around the globe. Its ‘string of pearls’ naval policy is one such example, with its developing of ports in the Asian subcontinent in places including Pakistan and Bangladesh aimed at serving the country's growing economic, diplomatic and naval interests.

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