Good news for poultry farmers; the ban on exports to China is being lifted. Good news all round; some £1.4bn of trade agreements with China were announced yesterday to coincide with premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Britain.
But that's where the positive stuff ends. Unfortunately, these deals will barely make a dent in Britain's yawning trade deficit with China. Nor do they address the underlying structural issues which act to keep British exports out.
In 2009, the last year for which detailed figures are available, China sold £17bn more to us in goods and services than we sold to them, making China far and away our biggest deficit country. Things plainly need to change.
Yet lamentable though the UK's export performance has been these past 30 years, the fault is more theirs than ours. They need to change a lot more than us if the UK is ever to exploit the glittering opportunities David Cameron is constantly banging on about.
What's needed, the Chinese ambassador to London said in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph, is a big flagship contract to transform the Anglo-Chinese trading relationship. Why not, he suggests, exploit China's growing expertise in high-speed rail by giving the contract for the £17bn London to Birmingham link to China?
Clever man that he is, I'm not sure Liu Xiaoming fully understands the nature of the problem. We need to be exporting more to them, not the other way around.
Now if China were to finance the line as well as build it, making Chinese taxpayers liable for the risk rather than our own, that might be a different matter. The link would at least then count as a big capital investment in the UK, and thereby help offset the costs of China's ever-growing trade surplus.
But in any case, it's not going to happen. The high-speed rail link is to be a substantially UK taxpayer-funded project. Anything the Chinese manage to win from the tender will only add to the deficit rather than subtract from it. The ambassador's "solution" would make the problem worse, not better.
In recent days, Mr Wen has come surprisingly close to admitting publicly something that he has long implicitly acknowledged, that the capital imbalances caused by the extraordinary size of China's trade surplus with the rest of the world have been a contributory factor to the recent financial turmoil.
More than any other Chinese leader, he seems to recognise the need for change. The Chinese economy, he has said, has become "unstable, unbalanced, unco-ordinated and ultimately unsustainable".
Just as the UK economy needs to rebalance away from domestic consumption to net trade and investment, the Chinese economy must rebalance the other way from net trade and investment to consumption. But can Mr Wen deliver? So far, the practice has failed to match the rhetoric.
It's easy to see why. China's economic miracle was built on exports and investment, dynamos of growth which are now hardwired into the country's economic DNA. Change is not just difficult; both politically and economically, it's also exceptionally high risk.
Social stability – and what China's political leadership still self-interestedly imagines is the only guarantee of that stability, the continuity of Communist Party rule – is still prioritised over the sort of economic liberalisation that would allow for a more balanced world economy.
In recent years, consumption has grown strongly, creating the illusion that things are indeed changing. But it hasn't grown nearly as strongly as savings and investment, which still form a bizarrely high proportion of Chinese GDP.
It's a paradox. China has joined the World Trade Organisation, and put itself on the path to the sort of rules-based system that allows for full foreign participation. Yet the fundamental structure of the Chinese economy hasn't changed at all. If anything, growth has become even more reliant on domestic investment and exclusive of outside involvement.
China denies the charge, but this propensity to save, invest and export the surplus comes right from the top. Everything is bent towards the investment necessary to create the world's "other superpower". In many respects, this is admirable. The UK wouldn't be in the mess it is today if it had spent more time investing in its future and less on consuming it.
Yet China's thrift doesn't come naturally. It is not, as sometimes assumed, an entirely cultural phenomenon. Pro-saving and anti-consumption policies are deliberately pursued as acts of economic planning. The commanding heights of the economy remain very much occupied by the state, with the economic landscape still dominated by state-owned enterprises. Wages and dividends are deliberately repressed to allow for the accumulation of reserves that finance the boom in investment.
Perhaps the UK and other big deficit nations should be indulging in the same approach. Indeed, it's possible to see the Bank of England's zero interest rate policy partially in this light.
By keeping interest rates low, the Bank contributes to an undervalued currency. The relatively high level of inflation this policy generates reduces the real value of wages, making the country more competitive for exports and investment.
Yet it scarcely needs saying that not all countries can be surplus nations. It's a mathematical impossibility. The most articulate proponent of the view that China may be politically incapable of rebalancing in the way Mr Wen promises is Michael Pettis of Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.
As he puts it in a recent blog: "If the high-consumers become as virtuous as the low-consumers, that just means that global demand will decline, and with it, global employment." The world economy requires that there should be surplus and deficit nations.
It would be nice, on the other hand, if the polarisation between the two were not quite so extreme. What's more, China risks running into a brick wall if it carries on as it is. Roads to nowhere and companies so desperate to invest their cash surpluses that they sink it into an already seriously overheated property market are only two examples of the gross misallocation of capital that excessive saving and investment is already causing.
But in any case, it's not going to happen. The high-speed rail link is to be a substantially UK taxpayer-funded project. Anything the Chinese manage to win from the tender will only add to the deficit rather than subtract from it. The ambassador's "solution" would make the problem worse, not better.
In recent days, Mr Wen has come surprisingly close to admitting publicly something that he has long implicitly acknowledged, that the capital imbalances caused by the extraordinary size of China's trade surplus with the rest of the world have been a contributory factor to the recent financial turmoil.
More than any other Chinese leader, he seems to recognise the need for change. The Chinese economy, he has said, has become "unstable, unbalanced, unco-ordinated and ultimately unsustainable".
Just as the UK economy needs to rebalance away from domestic consumption to net trade and investment, the Chinese economy must rebalance the other way from net trade and investment to consumption. But can Mr Wen deliver? So far, the practice has failed to match the rhetoric.
It's easy to see why. China's economic miracle was built on exports and investment, dynamos of growth which are now hardwired into the country's economic DNA. Change is not just difficult; both politically and economically, it's also exceptionally high risk.
Social stability – and what China's political leadership still self-interestedly imagines is the only guarantee of that stability, the continuity of Communist Party rule – is still prioritised over the sort of economic liberalisation that would allow for a more balanced world economy.
In recent years, consumption has grown strongly, creating the illusion that things are indeed changing. But it hasn't grown nearly as strongly as savings and investment, which still form a bizarrely high proportion of Chinese GDP.
It's a paradox. China has joined the World Trade Organisation, and put itself on the path to the sort of rules-based system that allows for full foreign participation. Yet the fundamental structure of the Chinese economy hasn't changed at all. If anything, growth has become even more reliant on domestic investment and exclusive of outside involvement.
China denies the charge, but this propensity to save, invest and export the surplus comes right from the top. Everything is bent towards the investment necessary to create the world's "other superpower". In many respects, this is admirable. The UK wouldn't be in the mess it is today if it had spent more time investing in its future and less on consuming it.
Yet China's thrift doesn't come naturally. It is not, as sometimes assumed, an entirely cultural phenomenon. Pro-saving and anti-consumption policies are deliberately pursued as acts of economic planning. The commanding heights of the economy remain very much occupied by the state, with the economic landscape still dominated by state-owned enterprises. Wages and dividends are deliberately repressed to allow for the accumulation of reserves that finance the boom in investment.
Perhaps the UK and other big deficit nations should be indulging in the same approach. Indeed, it's possible to see the Bank of England's zero interest rate policy partially in this light.
By keeping interest rates low, the Bank contributes to an undervalued currency. The relatively high level of inflation this policy generates reduces the real value of wages, making the country more competitive for exports and investment.
Yet it scarcely needs saying that not all countries can be surplus nations. It's a mathematical impossibility. The most articulate proponent of the view that China may be politically incapable of rebalancing in the way Mr Wen promises is Michael Pettis of Peking University's Guanghua School of Management.
As he puts it in a recent blog: "If the high-consumers become as virtuous as the low-consumers, that just means that global demand will decline, and with it, global employment." The world economy requires that there should be surplus and deficit nations.
It would be nice, on the other hand, if the polarisation between the two were not quite so extreme. What's more, China risks running into a brick wall if it carries on as it is. Roads to nowhere and companies so desperate to invest their cash surpluses that they sink it into an already seriously overheated property market are only two examples of the gross misallocation of capital that excessive saving and investment is already causing.
