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China and the West

I welcome your advice, Mr. Taylor, and shall return to the specifics of China. China is becoming the biggest economy in the world, so we must ensure that we maximise the benefits for the UK. We are the top EU investor in China and it is right that that should continue to be the case. I welcome the Government's stated aim to equip British people with a much better understanding of China and Chinese language skills. Will the Minister enlighten us about how the Government intend to do that? On my visit to China, I was struck by how huge the language barrier is, because of course it involves not just a language, but an entire alphabet and different symbols. I am not convinced that it is necessarily an easy language to learn. None the less, we should be encouraging that to be happening to build better relations economically and more widely. Climate change is a crucial issue in our relations with China. China has quickly become the world's biggest polluter, and we need to have its commitment at Copenhagen in December if we are to achieve a good deal. I was lucky to visit China last year with the Environmental Audit Committee. We were undertaking an inquiry into the international context of climate change post-Kyoto. I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the efforts that the Chinese were already making on that issue. They seemed to be truly committed to reducing emissions per yuan of GDP, which is very welcome, but the challenge that we face relates to the scale of the change taking place in China. Industrial pollution was mentioned as a visible sign of that. I was struck by the huge motorways going through Beijing. They were eight lanes wide and absolutely gridlocked with the increase in traffic. The fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese are still without access to electricity means that, rightly, there is an incentive—an imperative—for the Chinese Government to improve living standards. However, the downside of that is that they are rapidly building more coal-fired power stations, so working with the Chinese on climate change is essential.