No, alas. Business? - Yes.

But at least distance adds depth and perspective. And everywhere I look I see how a different culture tackles the economic challenges of today.

There is no point in directly comparing manufacturing industry in the Sheffield area and that of China, or any one of its thousands of different regions. What does interest me is the different way they approach the need for skilled workers and technicians.

In China, the mainstream of secondary and university education is engineering and science based. Not for them, other courses. It is as if someone has recognised that it is engineering and science based studies that contribute most to the national economy.

Would I like to see such career structuring in Britain? Yes and no. I believe in freedom of choice. But I am concerned that not enough students in the UK are pursuing engineering and science based studies, which will allow them to contribute to our national wealth through a career in our manufacturing industries.

That is something I do care about. Only by producing things - preferably high technology, well-made, well-serviced products that our friends and rivals here in China cannot easily mass produce - can we as a nation survive with a standard of living that is as high as we would want.

Make no mistake, for all their hard work - and they do work hard - the Chinese do not have our standard of living. They have to tolerate pollution and weak infrastructure. They have to be prepared to fit in with national planning of the economy.

I worry about education, not just in the Sheffield region, but across the UK. We fail our young people if we do not provide them the highest standard of education, which they deserve, to prepare them for either a real job - not a state excuse for reducing unemployment figures - or further education.

There are promising signs. Before I left, I discussed work and education with a lad who was planning to take an engineering apprenticeship AND study for a degree in his spare time. Would that such young people were the rule, rather than the exception.

I would argue with anyone that our young people are, taken as a whole, as bright, as imaginative, and as potentially skilled as any. But ambition - perhaps that's where we are falling down.

We have to solve this problem, and a few others, if we are, as a nation, to learn to live alongside the new industrial tigers.

One more thing. Here in China, the average rate of saving amounts to around 40 per cent of people's income. Had we begun to match this, we would not be seeing the so called "credit crunch" so badly impacting so many sectors of the UK today. Thankfully, much of manufacturing continues to perform well.

lGordon Bridge is chief executive of AESSEAL, the Rotherham engineering specialist.

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