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East Asia

That is not true. I will take the hon. Gentleman to a pile of small to medium-sized enterprises that we have helped to get business or have got business themselves in China. I can take the hon. Gentleman to a small to medium-sized enterprise near my constituency which has become one of the largest producers in China. Big companies in China sell their cottons, floor-wear and furniture-wear to it. Large British companies are opening up stores and facilities in China for the emerging working and middle classes. The company in my constituency has seen a niche market and has gone there. It is a small business set up by a small entrepreneur, which is ten minutes away from my constituency. In fact, the manager lives around the corner from me. In China, the company has been a massive success story in three years; it was a small to medium-sized enterprise that understood globalisation, how it works and what it needed to do to benefit from it. Its R and D is here. Its financial services are here. Its design is here. Its productive capacity has moved to the new marketplace and it is delivering in a new marketplace for UK inward investors. It has increased its employment base in the UK at the same time. That is not a large company; it is a small company that is growing because we have been able to give that company, near my constituency—I am saying this as a Minister, by the way; it has nothing to do with me personally—a tailored service. That is what we want to do, can do and are doing increasingly, not only for large companies but for small companies. Something else should be remembered. Every large UK company has, in my view, significant opportunities, when it wins contracts, to ensure that other British companies are in the supply chain. When we consider some of the construction projects and environmental projects that we are getting involved in across the globe, we see that very innovative small and medium-sized enterprises can take part in large projects and strategies. A great deal of effort is being made by me and by UKTI, with the small and medium-sized enterprises sector, to develop strategic approaches to individual markets for individual companies to gain access to them and to help them to sustain their business when they are there. Hon. Members referred to Africa. The relevant issues are stability, peace and good governance. I think that China recognises or needs to recognise that as far as a long-term strategy for its engagement in Africa is concerned, it has to support the international community on those three pillars, because energy security and supply cannot be provided for in an unstable, ungovernable world of conflict. It is not possible to invest in the infrastructure—social, industrial, educational and health—if the region is ungovernable and unstable. Therefore, I welcome China’s engagement in Africa, but in welcoming that, we want to ensure that there is transparency and a dovetailing of international efforts in Africa. In a short period, we have come a long way with Africa. The debt mountain has gone. We do not want a second, new debt mountain because of the ways in which loans are being offered. We do not want, in the new round of the World Trade Organisation talks, any attempt by ourselves and the European Union to give to the least developed economies of Africa effective access to our home markets to be undermined by trade agreements that are not WTO-compliant and that can lead to the undermining of indigenous employment, say in southern Africa. We do not want a situation in which the Chinese do not play their full part in peacekeeping, conflict prevention and dealing with the issues that arise when conflict happens. I feel optimistic, at this point at least, that China is recognising that. I am thinking of the participation that there has been in the work on the millennium goals that we set and other work that we have done on Africa. What we need to do and what we are trying to do now between the European Union and ourselves, bilaterally and multilaterally, is to engage in a series of transparent working groups with China on how we can engage effectively for the long-term stability of Africa—its economic and social stability. Africa needs to and can play a part in that, and I think that it needs to play a better part than it has played so far. I am not talking only about good governance. In the medium to long term, Africa cannot win the type of relationship that it wants and that is in its own interests if it does not help to reinforce good governance, stability and good economic management—it cannot and it will not. Failed states do exactly that—they fail. It is not possible, in a corrupt system, to have proper, transparent trading arrangements; the corruption wins out. Nor is it possible to build infrastructure in the way we need to internationally to help to build the capacity of African countries and the African people themselves if we do not act on a co-operative international basis.