Business and Trade Committee
9 June 2026
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Business and Trade Committee House of Commons
00:02 - 00:35
Speaker 4
Order, welcome to today's session of the Business and Trade Select Committee as we pursue our inquiry into the UK-China economic relationship. And Professor Carr, I'm going to start with you if I may. So this year, I think 140,000 Chinese vehicles have been registered, the Jiku 7 is the third best-selling car in Britain, we're all becoming used to cheap Chinese tech. Do you want to just tell us, you know, what's the kind of upside for British consumers of their access to what is obviously subsidized Chinese technology?
00:35 - 02:19
Speaker 3
Yeah, I guess those upsides are probably pretty clear in that over the last perhaps decade, China has moved from copying and producing lower quality technology to really leading in many areas, in many sectors. And so as a developed country we don't necessarily want to cut ourselves off from that kind of world-leading technology. Price, of course, purchasing power parity in China is much lower than it is in Western states, so they're able to develop technology very cheaply. They have a very deep bench of technology research, which is also important for us, not just as consumers, but for industry and research bases. They have, I mean, the Nature Index, which is one of many, many academic rankings, in 2016 had one or two Chinese, I think it had one Chinese university in it, the rest were American, British, and maybe the University of Japan.
And in 2026, ten years later, all but one is a Chinese university. And our first university comes in actually at 26, and there are nine more Chinese universities before ours. So they're, I mean, they're now graduating 70,000 STEM PhDs every year, which is more than the US and the UK put together. So they have very, you know, significant research power there.
02:19 - 02:26
Speaker 2
Have you got a sense, how should we as a committee judge how pervasive Chinese tech is in UK national life now?
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