Professor John Wilson, director of Teesside Business School, has returned from a fact-finding trip to China. He talks to Business Echo about his experience.

THE itinerary seemed daunting. In the space of 12 days, my colleague Dave Eadson and I were to fly to Hong Kong via Amsterdam, take the ferry across to mainland China, visit Guangdong Jianhua University in Shenzen, fly from Shenzen to Nanchang and visit Jiangxi Normal University, then a six-hour coach journey to Wuhan and a visit to Hubei University of Economics, a flight from Wuhan to Guangzhou, then a two-hour car journey to Zhongshan to visit Zhongshan Institute, followed by a return journey to Guangzhou, and a three-hour flight to Beijing.

Then a visit to the Beijing Institute of Petrochemical Technology and Beijing Normal University, before returning to the UK via Amsterdam.

Our objective? To establish long-term partnerships with a small number of Chinese higher education institutions. And the purpose of that? To facilitate the recruitment of Chinese students on to Teesside Business School's undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes, to establish arrangements where business school academics will deliver postgraduate programmes in China, and to explore the potential for collaborative research.

Why China? Because it is increasingly important for UK higher education institutions to develop their international activity. It brings real benefits, culturally, academically, financially and, to the immediate region, economically.

It also creates excellent staff development opportunities. Of equal importance, it enables students, while enriching our own society, to develop their education, skills and language proficiency and return to their homeland better equipped to undertake work and contribute to their country's development - and China is developing with breathtaking speed, with economic growth of about ten per cent a year.

The pace of growth was causing concern and led to a tightening of monetary policy by the People's Bank of China. This has proved very effective, so much so that concerns are now being expressed that the economy may have over-corrected itself. It is highly likely, however, that the underlying growth rates will continue well into the future.

A total of 1.3 billion people, a fifth of the world's population, live in China, and the sheer scale of the labour supply is the powerhouse of the current Chinese industrial revolution, a revolution with huge international implications.

Global investors are monitoring developments in China with the same intensity as they watch the US. A movement of 300 million people - equivalent to the population of western Europe - from the countryside to the cities has been engineered, fuelling the growth of the Chinese economy.

The spectacular progress can be seen in certain cities, with skyscrapers dominating futuristic landscapes. It is also reflected in key sectors, not least manufacturing, where output has grown by five to ten per cent a year for the past ten years.

China now accounts for seven per cent of global manufacturing production, which some observers believe could become 25 per cent in 20 years. In 2003, China was the second most popular country for foreign investment after the US, with telecommunications, electronics, automotive and chemicals among the sectors with the greatest spending.

Some specialists are predicting that by 2007, a third of the world output of goods and components in the electronics industry will be based in China; it already accounts for approximately 70 per cent of world production of motherboards, which are at the heart of personal computers. Motorola, Siemens, BP, Nokia and others are investing heavily in the country. Yahoo, in its rivalry with Google, has launched a Chinese Internet search website, called Yisou, which translates as one search, reflecting the strategic significance of the Chinese market to this and other sectors.

China is seen as the place to be as opportunities open up and a more entrepreneurial, pro-private sector mindset develops. This can be illustrated in any number of cities, including Harbin, a city in the north-east of China which is inviting foreign investment in large state-owned enterprises to finance economic modernisation.

Today, China wishes to be recognised as a market economy, a status that would make it much harder for other countries to impose anti-dumping penalties on Chinese exports. New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia, have already recognised the country as a market economy.

The US and the European Union are, in principle, committed to helping China achieve this status but, so far, have refused on a number of grounds to grant it, not least the scale of the state's role in the economy. The command economy is being dismantled, but this is one aspect of China deemed by the US and EU not to be happening fast enough. Despite this, the economy powers forward.

However, while cheap, unskilled labour is plentiful, there are shortages of skilled labour, in particular, senior engineers with management experience. This is where other economies and foreign universities can contribute to, and benefit from, the Chinese expansion.

More fundamentally, however, there are serious environmental problems.

The State Environmental Protection Administration, a branch of the Communist Government, warned earlier this year that China's industrial development was unsustainable.

In seeking to emulate the West, it is perhaps pursuing an inappropriate model, given its population size. In the past 20 years, oil consumption has risen 100 per cent, natural gas 92 per cent, steel 143 per cent, copper 189 per cent and aluminium 380 per cent. China burns 1.2 billion tonnes of coal a year.

Although it has a fifth of the world's population, it has only a fraction of its natural resources. Imports can offset the domestic economic problem, but environmental damage is being inflicted. A recent book, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future, by Elizabeth C Economy, and reviewed in the Financial Times on June 26, said that China had six of the ten most polluted cities in the world - just by breathing, some children are smoking the equivalent of two packets of cigarettes a day.

Acid rain affects a third of the territory, more than three-quarters of the river water flowing through urban areas is unsuitable for drinking or fishing and each year, 30,000 people die prematurely as a result of air pollution.

On a tributary of the Huai, a river with a valley the size of England and on which the book's title is based, residents say the water is too filthy for washing clothes or for their pigs to drink. It is said a clean-up would cost $100bn.

The Chinese government said it was committed to tackling these problems. Hu Jintao and Wen Jinbao, China's president and prime minister, have said a more balanced form of development will be pursued, environmental regulations enforced and offenders punished.

Environmental problems are acute in the West also, but the sheer scale of the Chinese population and economy make it globally significant.

Our whistle-stop tour was hugely enjoyable and productive and will, I am confident, prove beneficial to the business school and the university, our partners in China and our respective students.

It enabled my colleague and I, albeit in a tiny way, to get behind the statistics, to experience the warmth of the country and its people and to make a modest contribution in reinforcing the links between the Tees Valley and China.

These and other international links are, in my view, so important.

China may be vast in every sense, but, as people keep saying, it is a small world, and enhanced mutual understanding and collaboration can only be beneficial.