BRITISH MP HAILS PROGRESS, FROM FASHION TO BUSINESS
Richard Graham has helped broker many important China-UK partnerships since the 1980s
Richard Graham still remembers the tough physical challenge of crossing 1,000 kilometers of the Taklimakan Desert in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 1993.
“The strain of tugging camels over sand mountains, feet sinking with every step, took its toll,” he said.
“I caught amoebic dysentery and would have died without Carolyn (a fellow traveler) and powerful antibiotics.”
The expedition was the first to cross the full width of the Taklimakan, which is known as the “Desert of Death” for its mountainous dunes, huge temperature fluctuations, and severe lack of water.
Graham, now 60, was part of a team of five Britons, one United States citizen and several Chinese that successfully made the crossing. The United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II sent a telegram of congratulations, and the Chinese government issued a postage stamp in their honor.
Looking back, Graham said teamwork allowed the team to complete the challenge. The experience taught him the importance of collaboration, a lesson he has since used to achieve many fruitful results of China-UK collaboration in the business and political worlds.
“The three different parts of the team had never met before, spoke different languages, and had different ideas of what should be done. I believe in engagement and not giving up. If the Taklimakan Desert can be crossed together, then anything is possible,” said Graham, who has since become a Member of Parliament in the UK and chairman of its All-Party Parliamentary China Group.
In those roles, he has made significant contributions to bilateral relations. During President Xi Jinping’s 2015 state visit to the UK, Graham helped organize a tour of the Houses of Parliament. This year, Graham also accompanied British Prime Minister Theresa May on visit to China.
As MP for the Gloucester constituency, he has helped local businesses accelerate their China engagement and organized meetings in Parliament to help fellow MPs understand and engage with the country.
All these efforts and achievements stem from Graham’s affection for and fascination with China, which hark back to his first visit in 1980, two years after China introduced its reform and opening-up policy, accelerating its engagement with the outside world.
It was a time when China-UK relations were almost exclusively government-to-government, and Graham’s visit was part of a business trip by representatives from the British conglomerate John Swire & Sons.
Graham recalled the “strange feeling” he had of being an outsider when he first arrived in China, back when people dressed in Zhongshan suits, which had four front pockets and a short collar. He said he instantly purchased a Zhongshan suit for himself, “to make me look a bit more normal, and no longer so strange”.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Graham was heavily involved in many innovative China-UK partnerships, including the first listing of a Chinese company on the London Stock Exchange and the founding of the Shanghai Cricket Club.
He opened the first foreign investment banking office in China in 1993, in Shanghai for British merchant bank Barings. And he created the British Chamber of Commerce in the same city.
“None of these partnerships have been easy, but that’s the way with trying something new,” he said.
Working in China opened his eyes to the country’s rapid economic transformation. He has a son named Hu Sheng (meaning “born in Shanghai”), and he said the experience of fatherhood instilled in him a longing to contribute toward the lives of young children in China.
In 1998, Graham and his wife, Anthea, helped Briton Robert Glover establish the first China-UK joint venture charity, Care for Children, which has since placed 500,000 children in foster homes.
All these sincere gestures of friendship contributed to China’s development and engagement with the outside world, across the fields of economics, finance, and peopleto-people exchanges.
Statistics from the International Monetary Fund show China contributed 39 percent of global economic growth in 2016.
During the past 40 years, the country’s GDP has grown by an average of about 9.5 percent a year, and more than 700 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty.
Graham sums up China’s past 40 years as “priceless, so important to everybody, and it will determine the way in which China interacts with the world for generations”.
“The most exciting thing of my lifetime is the way Deng Xiaoping really changed the whole direction China was traveling in,” Graham said, adding that the sight of crowds of Chinese people all wearing Zhongshan suits will never be seen again, and that today’s Western visitors will no longer feel different because of their attire.
China remains dedicated to the path of further reform and opening-up. At the opening ceremony of this year’s Boao Forum for Asia, Xi pledged that China will take the initiative to expand imports and open China’s domestic economy “wider and wider”.
Graham stressed that he too believes it is imperative for China to continue its reforms. “As China becomes more self-confident, it will welcome more foreign businesses to have equal access in China, because it’s the competition that drives up the quality,” he said.
If China-UK business relations were led by the works of British companies such as Swire and Barings four decades ago, today the landscape is starkly different.
More than 500 Chinese enterprises have set up offices in the UK, with a total of $21.8 billion invested in projects ranging from traditional sectors, such as trade, finance and telecommunications, to emerging industries like new energy, high-end manufacturing, infrastructure and research centers.
The UK has also become China’s second-largest investment destination in the European Union, with China’s nonfinancial direct investment in the country last year totaling $1.53 billion, according to Chinese government figures.
Graham stressed that the UK is an attractive destination for Chinese investment, particularly because its high-tech sector can help the Chinese economy achieve its next stage of reform and become a tech-focused and consumptiondriven economy.
He cited the example of Chinese carmaker Geely’s 2013 acquisition of Manganese Bronze, the maker of London’s “black cabs” for more than six decades. After the acquisition, Geely invested 250 million pounds ($319 million) in its UK subsidiary to build a new, state-ofthe-art research, development and assembly facility.
Armed with the combination of Chinese investment and British high-tech manufacturing expertise, Geely now makes electric taxis in the English city of Coventry for global export.
Graham said such collaboration brings win-win benefits. Geely has benefitted from understanding how companies work in a Western environment and used that knowledge to carry out further international expansion.
Meanwhile, the investment from Geely helped the UK’s economy, he said, adding that similar China-UK collaboration opportunities are plentiful.
“The UK offering has got a huge way to go,” Graham said. “We have our bank of goodwill and considerable technological power. Particularly, for a country like China, we work best on collaborative partnerships.”
As China has already achieved considerable progress in its economy and other areas through 40 years of reform, Graham said now is “a very interesting time to try and reflect on the options ahead”.
Within the context of the United States backtracking from its globalization leadership role and the UK facing uncertainties as it leaves the EU, some analysts have pointed out that the time may be ripe for China to fill the newly created vacuum in global leadership.
Graham acknowledged the benefit of China’s growing participation on the global stage. However, he pointed out that China should not “try to accelerate global ambitions and risk not focusing enough on the depth of reforms still needed today”.
He added that the UK will continue to support China on its road to internationalization. “We’ve always been positive, always wanted to encourage China to participate in the global space,” he said.