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Chocoholic wrote:Geez you're becoming as bad as MB with the pointless cut and paste stories. And yes, the point is what? So what? Been there, done that, came out of it before! And....?

Speedhump wrote:

Chocoholic wrote:Geez you're becoming as bad as MB with the pointless cut and paste stories. And yes, the point is what? So what? Been there, done that, came out of it before! And....?

dont feed the TROLLs. Their shame is that they are intensely jealous that they can't exist without Caucasian brains to run their projects and developments. Their money cant buy them style, respect or a history, they hate it.

Speedhump wrote:

Chocoholic wrote:Geez you're becoming as bad as MB with the pointless cut and paste stories. And yes, the point is what? So what? Been there, done that, came out of it before! And....?

dont feed the TROLLs. Their shame is that they are intensely jealous that they can't exist without Caucasian brains to run their projects and developments. Their money cant buy them style, respect or a history, they hate it.

PM Gordon Brown pins economy hopes on China

The 500 businessmen and politicians who gathered at the Natural History Museum last Sunday for dinner with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, were treated to an unusual item of fusion cooking: “London Duck”.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai and Mark Kleinman
Last Updated: 6:50PM GMT 07 Feb 2009


PM Gordon Brown and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at a breakfast meeting at Downing Street last Monday Photo: AP

Seated at the top table alongside Mr Wen, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Paul Walsh, chief executive of Diageo, and Stephen Green, chairman of HSBC, had much to talk about as they tucked into the variation on China’s signature food export.

After attacking the West over the global financial crisis in Davos the previous week, Mr Wen had kinder words for his British hosts – and revealed himself to be something of an Anglophile.

He spoke of an appreciation for Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, and quoted Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English Romantic poet. Most importantly for Mr Brown, he vowed that China would eschew protectionism and remain open for business with Britain.

The audience was impressed, but it was not a pledge borne out of altruism: four times as much trade flows from China to Britain as it does in the other direction.

The following day, Mr Brown set another ambitious target for expanding the bilateral relationship.

He hailed China's openness to British business as "the most important agreement" of Mr Wen's visit. "I believe that the doubling of exports over the next 18 months [to £10bn] is something that is absolutely crucial to helping the economy to recover," he said.

Exports to China remain a small chunk of the country's overall export economy, and seasoned sinophiles in the audience would have been forgiven, however, for expressing some scepticism at the prime minister's vision. While British exports to China rose in value by 40pc in the first eight months of last year, they crumbled during the economic crisis. By the end of 2008, the growth rate was just 3pc. And the overwhelming question remains: does Britain have anything that China wants to import?

The Qianlong emperor had an answer to that in 1793, when he wrote to King George III that the Chinese "do not have the slightest need of your country's manufactures".

The potential for expansion is obvious, however. Lord Mandelson wrote in a newspaper article last week that "China is a vital engine in the global economy, and could well account for more than $2 trillion worth of global imports and exports in 2010. Along with that of the other emerging economies, it is only China's growth that will keep aggregate global growth from turning negative in 2009."

Peter Sands, the chief executive of Standard Chartered, suggested that the principle of expanding bilateral trade was more important than specific targets. "The point is not so much the precise number, but the scale of the ambition, and the fact that China has committed to work with the UK to achieve this goal," he said.

Yet Mr Brown is aiming for a record rise in exports just as the British economy slumps into a possible depression and concerns grow about Chinese domestic demand as millions of workers are laid off in what was until recently known as the "workshop of the world".

There is already confusion in Downing Street about when this target may be met. While Mr Brown set a timeframe of 18 months in his press conference last week, other parts of the Whitehall machine are more vague about the timing.

In Beijing, Alistair Morgan, director of trade and industry at the British Embassy, declined to discuss the new target. Mr Morgan may still be smarting from Mr Brown's last tractor-production targets, issued on his visit to China at the beginning of 2008. Then, the prime minister promised to double the number of Chinese companies listed in London by 2010 and welcomed the decision by the country's vast sovereign wealth fund to open its first overseas office in Britain.

Since then, there have been just four new Chinese listings on the London Stock Exchange, and China Investment Corporation has scaled back its investments after suffering multi-billion dollar paper losses on its shareholdings in Morgan Stanley, the investment bank and Blackstone, the private equity group.

There was one concrete, if small, achievement last year. Mr Brown's visit to China was rewarded with an agreement to allow the import of British pig offal into China.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of the China relationship," one person close to the Government said. Lord Davies, the new trade minister and former chairman of Standard Chartered, the emerging markets-focused bank, is understood to have been given a brief to build trade relations with faster-growing economies in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Last Wednesday, the House of Commons Business and Enterprise committee announced it would begin an inquiry later this month with the grim title: "Exporting Out of the Recession". And this week, the former Cabinet ministers Patricia Hewitt and Charles Clarke will be named as members of a new all-party parliamentary group focused on UK-India trade relations, underlining the growing importance in Whitehall attached to exploiting bilateral trade with Asia.

There is a long way to go. Last week there was no new money on the table despite the plethora of "deals" announced by the two premiers. An agreement between Airbus and Xian Aircraft, a Chinese aerospace company, "was not a sale, but relates to Airbus's investment in China which will help underpin future sales and performance," according to UKTI.

There was little of substance about where the targeted export growth will be generated, although UKTI said its officials in Beijing, Shanghai and the relatively untapped urban markets of Chongqing and Guangzhou were working to promote British exports from industries such as healthcare, advanced engineering and environmental technologies.

Stephen Green, the chief China economist at Standard Chartered, said the weakness of sterling would work generally in exporters' favour. "The pound is 30pc more competitive [against the yuan, China's currency] now," he said.

In Shanghai's glitzy shopping centres and corporate watering holes last week, though, there seemed to be little appetite for a doubling of British goods. Holland & Sherry, the Savile Row-based cloth weaver, has an office in Shanghai, but the manager said they had seen a decline in demand in recent months.

Whisky importers expressed doubts that the Chinese could drink any more Scotch. "They can ship twice as much over but can we double our whisky consumption? I don't think so," said Zhuang Yan, the head of Xiamen Deyuanda Trading, a whisky importer.

Richard Yorke, the chief executive of HSBC in China, was adamant that the doubling of exports would not come through the service industry. "My sense is that it probably won't come much from the service side. It will be things like high-end manufacturing instead. There is going to have to be a good analysis by British companies about what the market is here," he said.

And while both Mr Yorke and the UKTI are targeting the £400bn of fiscal stimulus money that China will pump into its economy this year, there seems little to aim at here either. "I've been speaking to companies about the fiscal package and they say that the money is all going to go to the big Chinese state-owned companies. After all, the package is meant to create Chinese jobs. We may get a small amount of trickle-down, perhaps to the architectural firms, but it will be small," said Mr Crawford. "I was a bit surprised by [Mr Brown's target], to be honest," he added.

Pressed for examples of British success in China, the UKTI named Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, Mini, Jaguar, Land Rover and Bentley, all of which are foreign-owned. Tesco, Balfour Beatty, Westinghouse, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Aviva, Arup and the BBC completed the list.

Mr Crawford said: "Wen Jiabao has agreed the deal, so the Chinese will simply mandate their companies to buy British," he said. "Of course, while the companies will obey, they will probably do their best to negotiate big discounts."

One thing is certain: the doubling of exports is unlikely to come from sales of "London Duck".