GORDON BROWN did not want his trip to China this week, the first he has made, to be seen as just another trade mission: a finance minister doing the rounds to drive up his country’s sales. It is supposed to be the platform for him to deliver a wake-up call to Britain about how to survive globalisation, and even prosper.

All the same, today’s headlines are dominated by the hope that the Chancellor may have helped to save the Rover car plant by breathing new life into a Chinese investment plan.

He is expected today to announce new hopes for a rescue by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, although he is keen to say these spring from talks between companies, not governments. The deal, worth more than £1 billion according to unconfirmed reports, has failed to take place as the months have ticked by, and the Government faces the prospect that Rover’s 6,500 jobs will still be under threat by the general election, expected on May 5.

For all the Chancellor’s discomfort in discussing Rover’s plight, it perfectly illustrates the central theme of his trip. Britain needs to react to globalisation by becoming “more enterprising, flexible, creative, adaptable, skilled and educated a nation than ever before”, he argues. The Chancellor gave warning that “others may wish to see China and globalisation as a threat”. But “I see the rise of China and the new stage of globalisation . . . as an opportunity”. Above all, Britain should recognise that education and the English language was one of its strongest cards. His visit to Beijing Middle School No 4, a secondary school, could not have been better scripted to prove his point. Neatly dressed teenagers quizzed him in faultless English.

Brown’s dream when he was their age, he offered, “was not to be a politician, but a footballer. If I wasn’t going to be a good footballer, then I wanted to be a good football manager. If not a manager, then I wanted to own a football team.” But then he realised that “no one makes any money out of it”.

That is a deterrent the students seemed to respect. One wanted to be a stock market analyst. Another wanted to be a “chief operating officer” of a Chinese company that would be “our own General Electric”; the Chancellor, amused, complimented him on his modesty.

Brown rightly declined their invitation to follow Cherie Blair’s example and sing. He ducked, too, questions about whether he expected to replace Jack Straw as Foreign Secretary. “I think you can see that I’m enjoying being Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

The scope of his trip has been forced beyond pure economics by the scale of China’s change — and the growing tension with the US. Washington believes that Europe fails to recognise the threat from China, economic or military; President Bush, in Brussels today, will make that point.

In one current row — whether China should adopt a flexible exchange rate, as the US wants — Brown came down towards the US position, with qualifications. In his meetings yesterday with Jin Renqing, Finance Minister, and Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, he expressed his preference for flexible rates.

But he also reasserted Britain’s support for lifting the European Union’s embargo on selling arms to China, an idea the US loathes.

In the current climate in Washington, Brown’s keynote speech last night would no doubt have sounded too indulgent to China — and perhaps too harsh towards Britain. He complimented China on regaining “its rightful place . . . as a leading world economy”. In contrast, he said, there was a “need . . . to persuade British people to change” if they were not to realise “all too late ” that they had been left behind.

He set Britain a target of doubling exports to China (now £2.4 billion) by 2007, and quadrupling them by 2010. Education would grow particularly fast, he said. In five years, worldwide sales of courses, language teaching and related materials have grown from £6.5 billion to £10.3 billion; he reckons they could be £20 billion by 2020.

The basis for these targets is not clear. Some schemes to help to reach them seem insubstantial, such as “twinning” every school, college and university with one overseas within five years. But his case for recognising the phenomenon is strong.

He noted that more than 300 million Chinese people currently speak English, and that “in 20 years’ time, the number of English speakers in China is likely to exceed the number of speakers of English as a first language in the rest of the world”. It is a case for a bracing kind of optimism, even if it is not heard that way at Rover, or in Washington.

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