Prime Minster's deal to flog pig semen to China is good material for jokes - like those made today on Radio 4's airhead News Quiz - but think what it really means: when the genetic material is in Chinese pigs, there'll be less need for our exports of high-quality pig meat.
When Britain sold out a significant portion of Birmingham's car manufacturing to China, the program was structurally similar: teams of Chinese went round the giant factory, trying to get into every office to grab blueprints and any other paperwork that would fast-track their own industrial knowhow. The managers at Longbridge had to station men outside to prevent the loss of informational material that wasn't part of the deal.
Soon, we'll look back and realise that intellectual property rights was an even bigger issue than the imbalance of manufactured goods.
We may even come to realise that many important people knew that all along, but we live in a globalised world and they won't necessarily hang around for us to question them. DNA = Did Not Attend.
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