There is a modest explosion in the conference room. After a number of years of very happy engagement with Chinese colleagues, there is still a sense, to my western ears, that any slightly animated conversation sounds like a series of fire crackers going off. Everyone has a view and an urgent need to express it - which all gives an impression of blood boiling somewhere. On this occasion the issue is no more than the slightly tardy arrival of a projector to support a presentation. Just another of those minor cultural adjustments you have to make as a matter of course.
I am with a small but disparate group of Chinese business people taking a tour around England with a view to getting some insight into the sort of business partnerships and connections they might be able to set up here. As well as setting up some exploratory meetings on their behalf I have been asked ( I think) to give them an overview of where the UK economy is coming from and going to.
They indulge my strangled mandarin introduction and listen politely and patiently to my penetrating analysis but it's clear from the questions that follow that their real interest is in trade and in what it is that England has to offer that might be of interest. And given the urgent desire of the UK to improve its trade balance with China, their views are interesting to say the least.
Just to establish a bit of context - and perhaps to oversimplify. China's economic model over the last two decades or so has been fairly straightforward. China has imported fuel, raw materials and capital equipment , combined these with cheap and abundant labour and supplied the rest of the world with low cost manufactured products. It has used the income from this to begin an astonishing modernisation of much of its infrastructure and major urban centres. This aim is to take this approach further and not to build a more consumer based economy and to clean up the environmental consequences that unconstrained industrialisation has left. This has to be delivered a without the potential financial melt down that loose credit post 2008 has spawned. All the while ensuring that the Communist Party retains its absolute grip on all political power. So that's all pretty straightforward.
And where does this leave the UK ? Well, we 'lost out' to an extent through the China boom since the late eighties because what they needed most, we were not positioned to supply - although European neighbours with a more robust machine tool sector did rather better. What opportunities does the newly emerging China present then?
My business guests were very practical folk - the broad brush of policy was of little interest. For the most part they had quite specific issues with products or processes. Energy intensive building products suppliers want to acquire energy from waste technology; house builders are looking for energy efficient insulation products; a mining company wants better safety management equipment. They have head that England/ the West does all of these things better - who can they meet or talk to ?
At the other end of the scale, the managing director of a health management company has heard of applications for things like diabetes management that are wearable by the patient and communicate via smartphone - can she explore that sort of development.
And as a final strand, the one representative of a government agency in the group is looking to support management development in smaller and medium sized companies. We have sent groups abroad for programmes that last a month or so, he says, but too much of that is spent sitting in classrooms. We need to have the opportunity to expose these people to practical work experience in some way in international companies overseas and need partners who can help deliver that.
Innovation and creativity are major new watch words in China right now but this often translates more truly as 'new to China' what is often wanted is plug and play solutions in terms of technology and services that with appropriate cultural modification will work in China. And this in turn raises a raft of familiar issues with regard to the protection of IP of the originators of these approaches.
And what does this mean for the UK and opportunity in China ? With a consumer sector and services expanding fast in China, our service based economy may well have greater scope than in the last phase of Chinese development.
The real requirement though maybe for a little less energy at the exalted level of policy makers and Business Secretary visits and more face to face encounters between business people themselves. That might require our side acclimatising itself to the firecracker nature of some Chinese discourse but the benefits could be quite as spectacular as a Chinese New Year display.
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