CBI Chinese New Year Celebration 2022

Attendees heard remarks from CBI President, Lord Bilimoria and Victor Zhang, Vice President at Huawei, and keynotes from Mark Logan, MP for Bolton North East and His Excellency Zheng Zeguang, The Ambassador of The People’s Republic of China.

The evening highlighted the major achievements of the past year and, crucially, looked forward to what further ambitious advances we can make – together – through even stronger bilateral trade, investment and collaboration, while also touching on areas of concern.

Nowhere is this more apparent or urgent for the future than in our countries’ race to Net Zero. 2021 marked a defining moment for the UK’s role on the global stage as hosts of the G7 and COP26.

At COP26 in Glasgow, business was present in force for the first time in COP’s history. It marks the growing global consensus that governments can’t get to Net Zero without business and that those firms who fail to step up to deliver Net Zero will get left behind.

As China’s historic agreement with the US to intensify collaboration on decarbonisation reinforced, the landscape is shifting. Internationally, there is a wall of capital – supported by companies worth trillions - ready to finance viable Net Zero projects. This includes, following President Xi’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, decarbonisation loans from the People’s Bank of China – another essential step to ignite action and help boost investment and jobs in both our countries.

Most importantly, despite the challenges of the past twelve months, we have a strong foundation on which to build together: the latest figures show total trade in goods and services between the UK and China to be around £91.9bn, an increase of £7.2bn from the previous year.

In 2022, we believe we can achieve even more, as we continue to learn to live with COVID-19 and focus on building forward together.

CBI wishes everyone a happy and prosperous Year of the Tiger.