Foreign Policy

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn]

My Lords, in thanking the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for launching this debate, I should like to concentrate on just one part of that very large canvas that has been sketched out. That one part—quite a large part—is China.

A great deal is said about the enormous development of China over the past few years. Statistics flow out and they are all fantastically impressive. For example, it is responsible for 7 per cent of the world’s GDP; China will very shortly overtake Japan as the second largest economy in the world; huge numbers of PhD students and engineers are turned out every year. All those statistics are significant. Our own relationship with China is significant. Among many other things, as noble Lords will know, China supplies the largest amount of investment in the European Union to the United Kingdom.

All this raises the question of how one copes with this rapid development of China. Our dialogue with China is very encouraging. The sort of things that can be talked about, and the way in which it can be done, would have been impossible 10 or 20 years ago. I think that it is common ground that we should try to encourage China to participate in all the international organisations.

However, one of the issues is the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. It is that those organisations were set up a long time ago, before China re-emerged on to the world scene. Therefore, if we want China to play a real part, we must accept that those organisations will have to change. You cannot expect a large country such as China, coming from a different background, simply to be absorbed without any effect on the organisations. Perhaps the IMF is a good example. There has been an increase in China’s contribution to it and therefore in its voting power, but it has been only very slight.

Another aspect is our understanding of China. It was encouraging that the Foreign Secretary spoke today about the need to re-emphasise geographical expertise within the foreign service, which has perhaps been downgraded over the past few years. As my noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard said, that expertise, which can be produced in the Foreign Office, is vital to what we are doing.

More broadly, we should have enough people in this country—not just in the foreign service—who have an understanding and experience of China. The same applies in the other direction: there should be enough people from China who have an understanding of us. There are something like 85,000 Chinese students in this country, 60,000 of them at tertiary level. There is a tiny number, it seems, of British students in China—3,000. However, the percentages—that is, the number of Chinese students as a percentage of the Chinese population and the number of our students in China as a percentage of ours—are almost identical. But 3,000 is not enough. We need at a much lower level an understanding and experience of China. I believe that around 500 schools in the UK offer Mandarin. Some make a great effort to do so, because they will just offer it and there will be two or three students. Perhaps I may take an example from Scotland and declare a sort of interest as the honorary president of an organisation called SCEN, the Scotland-China Education Network. I visited the other day Perth High School, a school of about 1,400 pupils. Something like half of those pupils were studying Chinese. They will not get to a high level; they will not go straight into the Foreign Office; they will not immediately become ambassadors—maybe later on they will; but they will have a feel for China and an interest in it, and some will go on to be specialists. I suggest to the Minister that he might encourage his ministerial colleagues to see how much this sort of experience could be transferred elsewhere in the UK, so we have more people studying China and Chinese. In the long term, that will be very much in our interests in terms of the whole way in which we react to China developing as it has been.

Perhaps I may make one last comment—on Hong Kong. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, in the negotiations in which he played such an enormous and significant role about the future of Hong Kong, used to refer to the Ming vase that we were passing on to China. The Ming vase has not been dropped; it is still there. Hong Kong is a success story. Hong Kong in China, but as a very special part of China, is not just a success story, and therefore a cause for great encouragement, but a place of enormous opportunity, of which I hope that people in the UK will continue to take advantage.