A long term relationship both personal and commercial: Leaders Lounge with Stephen Perry
A long-term relationship both personal and commercial: Leaders Lounge with Stephen Perry
#LeadersLounge is a high-profile business leaders interview programme by CGTN EUROPE and CCCUK.
#LeadersLounge is a high-profile business leaders interview programme by CGTN EUROPE and CCCUK.
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00:00I lost my father for long periods of time.
00:08He would be in China three to five months a year.
00:11And I didn't understand what China meant.
00:13It was a very different place with different people with different ideas.
00:17But it was like getting a story at bedtime at night.
00:22You didn't know your father was on an ice breaking mission.
00:25No, I had no idea at all.
00:28Later in life, all of us, the five children, began to understand what he, the difficulty
00:34that he had of making the decision to give up everything in his life and transfer it
00:40all to helping trade with China.
00:43I think he was open to doing something with his life that had more contribution to humanity.
00:50He took a big risk, but it worked out okay.
00:53Of course, as you know, my father was shocked beyond all imagination at the deprivation
01:00and the horrors of what he saw in China in 1953.
01:06He was just reduced to tears.
01:08He never cried.
01:09I never saw him cry.
01:10But he saw such terrible things that had happened to the Chinese people.
01:13When your father was in China back in the 1950s, China was really poor.
01:17Yes.
01:18What gave him the confidence to sell products to a country that was experiencing poverty?
01:23I don't think he was there to sell products to China.
01:26That was one aspect of it.
01:28He was there to buy from China as well.
01:30It was always considered to be a two-way trade.
01:33This was about cementing peace, cementing friendship.
01:38What commodities did your father buy from China and vice versa back then?
01:43Well, feathers was a big one.
01:44Feathers and downs.
01:45He ended up selling them to Europe and to the United States.
01:49Casings, which is the outside of the stomach of the pig, and it's used to wrap the sausage in.
01:58There are a lot of oils, tongue oil, there's a lot of different things.
02:02But we started the trade in porcelain, restarted the trade in porcelain.
02:08There was a lot of trade in porcelain from the 17th century.
02:12We did glass and basketware and floor coverings, all sorts of things.
02:18So you went to China back in the 1970s yourself for the first time, having learned so much
02:23about China.
02:24What was your experience like?
02:28I wouldn't say it was like my father's because he walked into terrible poverty.
02:32For me, it was absolutely amazing.
02:35I'd never come across anything like it.
02:38The visual impact of fields everywhere, right up to the edge of the railway track.
02:44Every piece of land was used for producing food and other things.
02:49I think the thing that I was left with was the people of China.
02:55What was translating China towards being a country of modernity was the people.
03:04They were determined to work all hours of the day.
03:08Whatever they did, they were doing it with great, great, great commitment.
03:13And the people of China was what I came away with as my strongest feeling.
03:19China is able to pull a group of people together to work out how to build trade from China
03:24to Europe through the land routes.
03:27That was being done for 40 years before they even got to the point of announcing it under
03:33Xi Jinping.
03:35So China has this long-term approach to planning.
03:39It has long-term, medium-term and short-term.
03:42And it's able to do all these things in a very sophisticated way.
03:46So what you saw was a different governance system, right there, and it changed your perception
03:51of China.
03:52Yes.
03:53And were you expecting something like the reform and opening up would come up?
03:58At that stage, I was trying to find a way to do long-term business with China, which
04:02at that stage was actually impossible, but that didn't stop me thinking about it.
04:07And I read very carefully everything from the 1978 Third Plenum and I got no idea what
04:15was going to happen.
04:16They were going to move 800 million people off the land into factories and becoming people
04:24who were in manufacturing and service industries.
04:27We had no idea that that's what was there.
04:30It took me 20, 30 years to begin to understand it.
04:33If you take, for example, about 15 years ago, everybody wondered why China was building
04:40so many roads and highways, but yet had no car manufacturing company.
04:44They innovated by creating joint ventures between the foreign car company and the Chinese
04:49car companies.
04:51They brought together some of the great scientists in China to work out how to make the next
04:55generation of car, which as you know now is the electric car.
04:59Nobody else was thinking of that.
05:01China worked out how to make the electric car and operated inside China.
05:05And China started exporting their cars because it's very important to the new energies.
05:11But now the EU has slammed additional tariffs on the Chinese-made electric vehicles.
05:17Do you think it's because China is supporting its electric vehicle business too much with
05:23the subsidies?
05:24What China is doing is they're making electric cars for the benefit of the people of China.
05:31And they're priced at the price that they ought to be to get the attention of the market.
05:38That's standard marketing, whether it's America or Europe or China.
05:42So what the Chinese are doing is offering that.
05:44So when the Europeans put on the tariff, what do the Chinese say?
05:48Hold on a second.
05:49We've given your car companies a fortune in access to the Chinese market.
05:54We didn't put tariffs on them.
05:55You put tariffs on us, we'll put tariffs on you.
05:58And all the car companies in Europe said, don't put the tariffs on.
06:01But these rather silly people in the EU bureaucracy, following American advice, want to try and
06:07make life difficult for China.
06:09And it's involved in a battle with China, which I don't think it will win.
06:13So you think that the US has a huge influence on EU's China policy?
06:19The Americans have put the tariffs on, but they're not going to have any much imports
06:22of electric cars.
06:24They're going to carry on with the petrol cars, because that's what they've been developing
06:27the market for for years.
06:28So there is a lack of reality at the moment about Europe's attitude.
06:33The problem for Europe is it wants to act tough like the Americans, and it can't.
06:39Because it doesn't have the power, the scale, and the imagination.
06:44And that's why Mercedes and people like this have said, no, don't put the tariffs on.
06:48Because they know that their world markets will be impacted as a result.
06:52The icebreaking trip your father made 70 years ago, let's look back as history, broke the
06:58trade embargo that some Western countries imposed on China.
07:01And now China's trade tensions, relations with some countries, including the US and
07:06the EU, you were talking about have soured again.
07:08So do you think it will get better or worse?
07:13And what is different now?
07:17My reading of it is that China saw this a long time ago.
07:21In the beginning of the 21st century, I could see China, it was called going global.
07:28What did going global mean?
07:30It meant moving the production out of China to different parts of the world.
07:36Globalization is under threat, protectionism is happening everywhere.
07:38But where is it happening?
07:39It's happening in Europe and North America.
07:41Why?
07:42Because they don't have global economies.
07:46They have national economies, and their companies make things in their countries that they want
07:50to continue to make them in their countries because they want to employ their people.
07:56How about the UK government?
07:57Do you think the Labour government could be different when it comes to its China policy
08:02compared with the previous government?
08:06The Conservatives developed a new trade policy to become important in Asia.
08:12Well, I've been saying for a long time, China's focused on Asia.
08:18But if you look at it, if we want to be significant in Asia, we're going to have to have a proper
08:23relationship with China.
08:25There's a lot of opportunity for the British government, for the Labour government, to
08:29reposition itself with the Chinese.
08:32It'll have to be very careful about how it handles the United States.
08:36There are more and more people becoming experienced in the UK about China, but we have to find
08:41the roads to recover that relationship.
08:44But it can be done.
08:48For more UN videos visit www.un.org