China offering plenty of opportunities for int'l companies, says British business leader

LONDON -- China is offering plenty of opportunities for international companies to do good business, and the firms are taking up those opportunities, a British business leader has said.

"What's interesting is that the business leaders have gone to Beijing. And they realize that the trade is still going on across the world, and that China is open for business in a very real way," Stephen Perry, chairman of Britain's 48 Group Club, told Xinhua during a recent interview.

"The world's business needs China. And the world's business will continue to find that China is a good place to be," Perry said.

When asked about recent remarks made by some U.S. politicians about the so-called "de-risking" from China, Perry told Xinhua that "the United States is trying to find out why China has advanced faster than the United States, and how did the United States with all the sophisticated capabilities get it wrong, and how did that happen."

They have a tendency to blame the other person, he added. "I think that the Americans have found it easier to explain away the advances that China has made by demonizing China."

However, Perry said, "once you start blaming the other person, you'll be getting to move away from reality. Once you move away from the realistic analysis of what's going wrong, then you're in trouble."

"Whether one talks about 'decoupling' or 'de-risking' -- whatever words one wants to use -- the world has changed beyond all imagination," he noted, adding that people who will lose most if the world is segregated into areas will be the West, as they will lose the best new markets in the world.

"What we have to recognize is that if we decouple, de-risk, separate ourselves from China and Asia, we will be the ones that lose out. Asia will have the highest amount of innovation and development. It will have the highest rises in economic development. And we in Europe and America will be cut off from it. It's not a good policy," he said.

"If we want to get a world that's good for the West, we have to participate in the Asian economy, and we have to recognize that at the center of the Asian economy is China. It's the biggest economy of them all, and Asians are going to be interdependent with China. And the West has to be interdependent with China," he added.

Rejecting the idea that the West can isolate China, Perry said it is only "a fantasy" and is "unrealistic." "Everywhere you go, you see China," he noted, adding that China is investing in technologies and different ways of innovation across the world.

During the interview, the business leader told Xinhua that the world will get smaller, not larger, and that countries worldwide will get more interdependent with each other.

"It'll change its form over the next 30 or 40 years, but it won't change its principal characteristic, which is multilateralism. It is the only way the world makes sense to work," he said.