“As I speak,” said Khalid al-Falih, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco, in an address at Tsinghua University in Beijing in November 2009, “a tanker full of Saudi Aramco petroleum is passing a container ship laden with Chinese manufactured goods bound for the Kingdom’s ports.” As he went on to remind his audience, “Chinese industry and commerce depend on the reliable supply of our oil to fuel their factories, and we in turn use Chinese equipment and services in our fields and facilities to maintain our reliability.”