Nasser Al Shaikh ناصر الشيخ

Professor Li Kaisheng, Vice President of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, and his colleagues hosted our @AGDAUAE delegation in Shanghai for a roundtable on how China and the UAE can help ease tensions in our region. Over decades, energy and trade have bound China closely to the Gulf, and few partners have more at stake in the region's stability. Much of the oil China relies on comes from our part of the world, so calm here serves its economy as much as ours. The UAE is not a party to this war. From the start, it has worked for de-escalation and a return to diplomacy, grounded in respect for the sovereignty of every state. In my view, lasting calm will come from patient diplomacy that keeps every side talking, and from partners who treat that stability as their own interest.

A visit to @Huawei’s research center at Lianqiu Lake in Shanghai offered a clear view of how far sustained investment in research can take a country. What stays with me is the patience behind it, years spent building talent and knowledge before the results appear. That lesson resonates with our own path in the UAE, where we continue to invest in knowledge and in the people who will lead it forward.

Professor Yijia Jing, Dean of Fudan University's Institute for Global Public Policy, hosted my lecture in the Institute's Global Leadership Series, on the Gulf between escalation and lasting peace. It's a credit to @FudanUniversity that the hall brought together Chinese students alongside a number of international students from Italy, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, with an Iranian-American student among them. A war in the Gulf touches each of them in its own way, and that kind of exchange is where real understanding begins. China is not a party to this war, yet few countries have as much standing with everyone involved, as a major economic partner of Iran and of every Gulf state. In my view, that standing is its most valuable contribution at this stage, to urge calm and keep diplomacy alive while the region's own states build a lasting peace.