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British Business (China)

That is important. China is growing at a rate of 10 or 12 per cent. a year and will perhaps itself experience a dip, but the fundamentals in terms of medium and longer-term growth prospects for the Chinese economy are extremely good. It is an occasionally foolish or brave politician who makes critical observations about his or her own country, but I worry that, by contrast, we in Britain are sometimes gripped by a sense of national fatalism—whether in relation to the millennium dome, terminal 5 at Heathrow, Wembley stadium or the 2012 Olympics. In China I was struck by the sense of opportunity and the pace of change. We have to be able to respond to that. However, we need to consider the crumbling infrastructure and the unsatisfactory levels of educational attainment in the British system. The hon. Member for Sittingbourne and Sheppey made a point about our inability to deliver infrastructure projects on time and on budget. We cannot afford to allow that indulgence to continue. We allow ourselves to believe that there is some sort of settled world order. For example, when the G8 summit is held, the eight leaders stand on the stairs and, with the exception of the Japanese Prime Minister, they are all western faces—I was going to say men, but that is not the case with the German Chancellor. We think that that represents the global hierarchy; and it has done for a long time. I am not saying that America, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, or even Canada will not have a role to play in the future—of course they will. However, the order is changing and we have to reflect that changing order—whether through our Foreign Office, our national mindset or in the way in which our companies do business. What are the potential risks for China? One risk is the enormous disparity in wealth. Shanghai is the only place in China I have ever been to, but it is like going to New York and thinking one has seen America; there is a lot of China beyond Shanghai. Some people still live in extremely straitened circumstances. It is difficult for any country—particularly one that claims to represent some sort of vaguely communist ideal—to sustain such disparities of wealth. As the hon. Member for Wirral, South said, the Chinese economy needs to grow rapidly in order to ensure that the gap does not grow to the extent that it causes greater social tension. The depletion of natural resources is also an issue. If 400 million people move to cities in the space of a couple of decades, it has huge implications for raw building materials. We delude ourselves if we think that we are an advanced nation with a huge amount of environmental heightened awareness, and that the Chinese are not aware of such subjects. When we went to BP, I was struck by the fact that it had an American international director of global innovation—in BP terms, innovation means anything other than oil. I, or one of us, said to him, ““You are an American, so why aren't you in America or based in London?”” He said, ““Because if you're interested in innovation and change, you have to be in the country where innovation and change is moving at the faster pace, and that is here in China.”” BP is investing more in research in China than in its university partnerships in Britain and the United States. The big question for China is whether it can let the economic liberalism genie out of the bottle but keep the political liberalism genie inside. We shall no doubt discover the answer in the months and years ahead, but if European Governments think that they can pull up the drawbridge and, with protectionism and restrictive labour laws, resist the changes that are happening in China, they are deluding themselves. The challenge for Britain is to show that we have the ambition, confidence, innovation, application, energy and education to compete and succeed. The task for the new Secretary of State, his ministerial team and officials and our country as a whole is to show that we can live up to that challenge.