"China's first stretch of railway track was built by a British firm in 1876, but soon dismantled on the orders of Chinese imperial officials who regarded it as a fiendish foreign invention. The second was built in 1881 under the supervision of Claude Kinder, an English civil engineer. This one survived, and its first locomotive, in tribute to Robert Stephenson, was called the Rocket of China.
Kinder went on to become one of the men, many British, who shaped the extensive steam railway system that transformed the Chinese economy and ushered Chinese society into the modern age. Kinder, created a mandarin of the Red Button by the imperial government for his services would no doubt be amazed at the thought that Chinese engineers could soon be on their way to Britain to help build a railway here. How the wheel turns! Britain has almost completely lost the skills that made us the first railway nation and which we exported on a vast scale, while the Chinese are in the process of gaining them.
The Chinese bullet train network was created with help from German, Japanese and Canadian firms, but its newer trains and track are to its own design, and it is now poised to sell them to the rest of the world.
Whether David Cameron, who sometimes seems lacking in a sense of history, had any thought for this bitter dimension when he announced in Beijing, with the Chinese prime minister, Li Keqiang, standing next to him, that Britain welcomed Chinese investment in our own HS2 project, we cannot know.
What applies to railways applies with equal force to nuclear science, where Britain was within living memory a pioneer, but now must turn to others, including China, for help with new power stations. Yet this turning of the technological tables can be overemphasised. Comparative advantage shifts, as it always does. Britain is not so far gone, scientifically and industrially, and China is not so far advanced as a black and white comparison between 1881 and 2013 might suggest.
That is why, among other reasons, it is regrettable that the British approach to China under the coalition has come to have about it something mendicant, cap in hand, and unduly deferential. Mr Cameron began in office determined to stand up to China on human rights issues and to indicate disapproval of China's policies in Tibet. He even met the Dalai Lama. The Chinese, of course, regard any encounter with a man who is widely regarded as among the sanest and most decent people on the planet as a vicious outrage that must be immediately punished, and Britain was duly shoved out and cold-shouldered.
The British government then changed its position on Tibet, and was rewarded with permission for the large trade mission that arrived in China on Monday. The prime minister chose to herald the trip withanartcleina Chinese publication, claiming that Britain was China's best friend, most assiduous advocate, and most willing partner in the world. If this is not fawning, it is pretty close to it.
True, Britain is not alone in this pro-Chinese litany. Every member of the European Union has sung the same song at one time or another, all discarding principle as they sought to secure a share of the Chinese market and, these days, a share of the money China now has to invest abroad. Much sniggering behind the menu card at the Chinese foreign trade banquet can be heard as competitors blot their copybooks on human rights matters. Britain struggled for years, for example, to get the best possible deal for the people of Hong Kong while other countries resolutely looked the other way.
Japan now has less support on South China Sea issues than it should have, for the same reason, which is that the approach of trade-hungry nations to China positively invites a divide and rule response.
There may be poetic justice in the fact that once upon a time European nations divided China and now China finds it easy to divide us. But it is not in the end good for either side that this should be so".
