John Reed in Jerusalem and Charles Clover in Beijing
When Israel
held its biggest agricultural technology conference, Agrivest, last
month, one in 10 of the delegates who travelled to the central city of
Rehovot to attend came from China.
A few weeks before, a large delegation from Alibaba,
the Chinese e-commerce giant, had been in Tel Aviv to attend Cybertech,
Israel’s main conference on cyber security, an area in which the
security-conscious Jewish state excels. Alibaba in January invested an
undisclosed sum in Visualead, an Israeli company specialising in QR code
technology.
Chinese
companies are pushing deeper and further into Israel than ever before,
and Israeli companies and government officials are returning the
embrace. “There seems to be a kosher stamp from the government on both
sides to let these trade relations blossom and bloom,” says Jon Medved,
founder and chief executive of OurCrowd, the Israeli crowdfunding
company.
A decade ago, Chinese overseas investment was primarily focused on
securing supplies of natural resources in places such as Africa and
Latin America, and was driven by state-owned energy and mining
companies.