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British Business (China)

I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Nuneaton and Shanghai (Mr. Olner) and for Wirral, South and Beijing (Ben Chapman) for the way that they masterfully looked after us in Shanghai. It was by some way the best trip I have ever been on. It was the best prepared trip—we had a number of seminars, language tuition and a marvellous pre-run before we got there. Everyone has said ““Well done”” to the Industry and Parliament Trust and I commend it for its utter professionalism, which was outstanding. I, too, have done an IPT fellowship: mine was with Motorola 10 years ago. Motorola was the first company in America to be in China, 25 years ago. That was a hard call. I was pleased to be in Shanghai, having been brought up in Hong Kong. It was good to see, in a sense, a second side of the Chinese face. Some of the presentations that we received were outstanding. I still remember the BP presentation on intellectual property. The Chinese have struggled with that, but they are trying to get to grips with it, and BP is taking a global lead on that with them. I share hon. Members' reservations about whether we are really clued-in to what is going on in China. I ask the Minister to set up a China council on the same level as the National Economic Council on the credit crunch that we are considering at the moment, because I do not think that Departments understand what is going on. If the 19th century was the British century for the world and the 20th century was America's, last week the 21st century became the Chinese century. China has $3 trillion of reserves, which is much more than the Federal Reserve has and certainly more than the Bank of England and Frankfurt have. This is the changing of the guard and we were lucky to just be on the edge of it in May and June. A totally new approach is required. I shall try to illustrate that by looking at our Foreign Office representation. In China, we have one embassy and four consulates for a population of 1.3 billion. In India, we have one high commission, three deputy high commissions and three trade offices for a population of 1.2 billion. In America, we have one embassy and seven consulates for a population of 302 million. In Europe, we have 27 embassies and nine consulates general for a population of just under 500 million. That works out, in representation terms, as one embassy or consulate in China per 260 million people and, in India, one in 172 million. That is completely wrong. We are so out of—I cannot think what the word is. We have misread the tea leaves about China and India at every level of Government in this country. We have done some good things in India—for example, we set up the UK India Business Council, and the UK-India education and research initiative to look at universities exchanging students and courses and trying to build relationships—but we have not done that in China. I hope that, out of this—although it is too early for the Minister to comment—comes the recognition that we need to have a proper all-engaging discussion about what we do about China. The events of the past two weeks have been so profound that I am not confident that we get it. That was one of the good things about going on the trip: not only was there terrific fellowship from all parties, but it was good fun and hard work and, because we were well prepared, we got so much more out of it than has been the case on previous visits. One of many statistics given in a presentation threw me completely: 80 new cities of 5 million people each will be built in China over the next 10 years. That means 400 million new houses and other buildings, including schools and hospitals, as well as roads and goodness knows what. The demand for British product would be absolutely enormous, but where are we? We are behind Germany and France already.