Barbara Woodward: Britain's first female ambassador to China intends to forge strong links with the growing economic superpower

When the Duke of Cambridge arrives in China later today, behind the scenes of his historic visit is another landmark development – Britain’s first female ambassador to the emerging global superpower.

Barbara Woodward, a career diplomat who took up her new posting last month, will accompany Prince William to the GREAT Creativity Exhibition in Shanghai, which will showcase British innovation and the arts. In an interview with The Independent on Sunday before she started her new job in Beijing, Ms Woodward said Britain’s link with China was now as important as its longstanding special relationship with the United States.

Her top priority is Britain’s burgeoning trade and investment in China, which is worth £60bn to the UK economy. But there are also the social and cultural links between the two nations – helped by the famous lure of Bicester shopping village, which attracts 47 per cent of Chinese tourists to the UK. In a sign of how lucrative the Oxfordshire retail centre has become, two Bicester Village outposts will open in China, including one outside Shanghai.

“Chinese tourists on average spend four times more than the average tourist to Britain. They are a serious proposition to UK tourism,” Ms Woodward said. “However you cut the cake, tourism is somewhere between our third- and seventh-largest industry. And retail is incredibly important to tourism.”

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Asked whether being British ambassador to China was more important than the supposedly plummest job in the diplomatic service, in Washington, Ms Woodward said: “You can’t argue that the United States is anything but the global pre-eminent power. So we have to have a strong diplomatic relationship with them, but as China is now a rising superpower and by many metrics may overtake the United States, we need a strong diplomatic relationship with it, too. A diplomatic relationship with the States and a diplomatic relationship with China are built on different histories, cultures, different understandings and legacies, and they come through in different ways. Both are incredibly important.

“China is the rising power, the world’s second-largest GDP – and, by some measures, the world’s largest. Even in a slowing economy, I think the economy is a huge story. Where China is going politically in the world order is a key question, and I think we don’t yet know the answer to that. You won’t get a strong sustainable trade and investment relationship with China unless we see further reform, opening up of the market, particularly in financial services and services in general [and] further progress on the rule of law.”

Young British people should consider learning Mandarin because it has become much easier, Ms Woodward said, in part thanks to websites such as Chineasy, which translates the complicated characters in a fun way. She said: “It’s getting easier to learn Chinese, because the Chinese have got better at deconstructing and teaching their language.” It is now possible to do predictive texting in Chinese. She said: “I can bash things into my phone and know I’m broadly getting it right. So it’s become much easier to learn. It does have to be well taught… and it is definitely worth starting young.”

Ms Woodward joined the Foreign Office fast-stream in 1990, and has held posts in Russia, the EU and the UN. She said the Foreign Office had been excellent at mentoring women, but warned against diversity quotas in the Civil Service: “I hope that we don’t go to quotas because I think then you risk undermining the concept of merit. If I got this job because we had quotas, I would be haunted slightly by the doubt that it was unfair in some way.”