We are partners with China

Aug 13 2008 by Alex Turner, Liverpool Daily Post

Executive director of the Liverpool Shanghai Partnership, Dr Kerry Brown, will tell business leaders later today that China is at a crucial point in its economic development – and Liverpool can profit. Here, he outlines the challenges and opportunities available to Merseyside businesses

LIVERPOOL has links with China reaching deep into the 19th century. It was twinned formally with Shanghai in 1999.

Last year, Cllr Warren Bradley visited Shanghai and signed a five-year memorandum of understanding with the city leaders.

One of the commitments, to take part in the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, has already moved forward. Liverpool was selected to be one of 55 cities with its own stand at the six-month expo, showcasing urban best practice.

Shanghai is a city with 21m people, spread over a massive area, with the world’s busiest port, and a major new international airport.

It has 2,000 buildings over 20 storeys high, including a just-completed 100-storey building, which will be the tallest in China until the completion, in the next year, of an even taller one.

But it is also a city with a major pollution problem. Smog covers the city most days. It is a city with some of the wealthiest people in China, and a stock exchange in which 73m people invest, but also a place with 4m migrant workers, many of them living in poverty and insecurity. It is a city rebuilding itself, changing daily, running to catch up with itself.

CHINA is a fifth of humanity. Its need for raw materials and energy is almost insatiable. It has become the world’s third largest economy, and in the process managed to accrue almost £1 trillion in foreign reserves.

China set up a sovereign wealth fund last September. This is being invested abroad, in companies like BP and Total.

For the last 30 years, China has been attracting investment. Now it is poised to become an outward investor.

Liverpool being at Shanghai in 2010 gives it a key place in this extraordinary, unfolding story. The two cities were linked a long time ago. But this long and winding road is far from reaching its end, and Liverpool now has the chance to be part not just of Shanghai and China’s past, but also of its future.

THE lecture takes place at the Athenaeum Club today, between 12.30pm-2pm.