As the tweet says, we already do £67.5bn of trade (exports + imports, 2017) with China, and £1.8bn is less than 3% of that. It might be worth a bit more to the UK in the long run if the estimate is for new exports, especially services. And the long run is important. One Belt, One Road is a huge, vague initiative taking in more than half the world's people and nearly half of the world's GDP as of today.
"'It means everything and it means nothing at the same time,' said Christopher Balding, a professor of economics at Peking University." So there you have it. It's China's new trade policy, it's a "philosophy" or a "party line", it's a way for China to get into every country in Eurasia (with Africa on the side). "'China is looking to use OBOR as a way to ship its own domestic overproduction offshore,' said Nick Marro, an analyst with the Economist Intelligence Unit".
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| Map and quotes above from "Just what is this One Belt, One Road thing anyway? |
OK, so it's big. And we might get 3% or so more trade than we currently do with China out of all that business in all those countries. As I responded to Ms Romeo on Friday, that's "hardly ambitious". I assume it's £1.8bn per year by the way.
The link in her tweet is to "A guide for British businesses interested in selling goods and services in China" which is presumably the place to start for a British business interested in branching out. I'd recommend you give the department a ring as well, though, because they organise trade trips to places like China, and they have a Minister of State with some business experience (one Rona Fairhead, sometime chair of the BBC Trust and director of HSBC) who's written a piece called "Why China’s Belt and Road offers the UK huge opportunities" which starts in some familiar places:
"China’s middle class is expected to number 600 million by 2020 – greater than the current entire population of the EU. This too offers fantastic potential for UK businesses looking to sell their goods and services in China, as illustrated by the £9.8 billion worth of trade deals signed by the International Trade Secretary Dr Liam Fox’s visit to China and the Prime Minister earlier this year [this is a bit garbled, but I know what she means]. These deals covered a range of sectors, including energy, education and financial services, and included major new investments into the UK."
£9.8bn of trade deals eh? That'll be over several years presumably, and it's not just exports, but even so £1.8bn isn't very exciting next to it. Indeed, Fox told the Guardian on that very trade trip that "Chinese e-commerce sellers had signed up to sell £2bn worth of UK goods over the next two years". Do you suppose Antonia Romeo missed a zero or two out?
Oh, and is any of that business actually dependent on Brexit in any way? We're doing business now. What does being an EU member prevent us doing? The headline of the Guardian piece is "Liam Fox admits being in EU doesn't stop more trade with China". A Chinese businessman, as reported by the BBC on 31 January 2018 during Fox and May's trip, told us that the UK has seen his country only as a trading partner, whereas Germany has worked with China in strategic economic areas. Unsurprisingly, the Germans do more trade with China than we do, and last time I looked Germany was a member of the EU.
