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East Asia

I am glad to follow the hon. Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry). Those six-monthly visits to Hong Kong offer the most extraordinary advertisement for the virtues of Hong Kong, but I hope that he will speak with equal vigour about business in Banbury if he expects businesses to invest there. I also hope that those visiting parliamentarians continue to press on human rights. I first visited China in 1980, when I had the thankless task of trying to convince the Chinese Government to sign up to an international copyright agency. At that time, I might as well have asked them to walk to the moon. The country’s technology and economy have changed immensely, but its respect for human rights has not. The most startling conversations I had were about organ donation. They simply could not understand why we thought that harvesting organs from people who had been executed and had not given their consent to donation was unacceptable. I must take issue vigorously with the notion that business is conducted whether the other Government are nice people or not. China will buy from British business when what British business wants to sell to China is what the Chinese want to buy, not because we are shilly-shallying over human rights. Our biggest opportunity is the forthcoming Olympics in Beijing. During that period, the International Olympic Committee will take over the functions of the nation state at Olympic venues, so it will have huge powers. There will also be a massive influx of western journalists, and it will be an opportunity for further work. I simply do not accept the argument that human rights and trade do not go well together. I thought that we had buried it 10 or 15 years ago.