As we all know, the British just love drinking tea! After all, it's an excuse for not doing any work. It's a comfort drink, a reviving, and consolatory drink. It can also be an accompaniment to work -- for example writing speeches like this! A social ritual -- even though in the West we are not that good at social ''ritual'' any more.

In the old days most of our tea came from China: indeed it was your biggest export to the UK -- our biggest import from you, for many decades. It contributed to a large trade imbalance between our two countries, one that still exists today. We always seem to want more from you, than you want from us. Last year, according to a recent BBC programme, there was a £6bn trade deficit between the UK and China. We exported £2bn worth to you, but imports to the UK from China, I gather, are way ahead -- and growing at more than one billion pounds per annum. A few years ago it was toys: now it's more to do with clothing and electronics -- your labour costs are so much less than ours.

That deficit I mentioned: it's only there in the goods and manufacturing sector. When it comes to services, we show a small surplus from the UK perspective (£800m to be precise) -- in education, know-how, law and so on. And I suspect in culture: visits by major British companies -- the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Ballet, Cheek by Jowl, Rambert and multiple orchestras. There's even going to be an export from where I work -- the Barbican. We're currently mounting a design show ''Communicate'' which vividly traces the last forty years of British Graphic Design -- one of the UK's strongest cultural assets. When it finishes its run at the Barbican (where we're currently attracting a large and young audience) it will tour under British Council auspices to five venues in China -- including Shanghai.

But then the market in visual arts has always been more tradable I suspect: the definition of ''chineseness'' more focussed and readily defined for a contemporary market at home and abroad. You have an architecture biennale in Beijing. In London only this week a major show opens of Chinese contemporary and avant-garde painting. I saw a similar and powerful show in Edinburgh a few years ago, which later came to the Barbican. Even more striking is the fact that the Uffizi Gallery in Florence -- that home of the European renaissance -- last week launched its first show ever to include modern work: an exhibition of self portraits (Botticcellis, Medici noblemen, visiting modernists like Matisse and Picasso) plus, yes, three Chinese works, which by all accounts steal the show.

Nor are they conventional, decorative self-portraits: Yang Shaobin's ''Number 3, 2000'' is a life-size sculpture of psychological deformity: a screaming head, drenched and encrusted in thick red paint. Yang Pei-Ming's ''Red Self Portrait'', a glaring painted enlargement of an identity snap from the Mao Tse Tung era in blood-red impasto. Finally from 1996, ''The Duke and me'' by Yue Minjun -- a satirical double portrait of himself laughing hysterically, back to back with a renowned Piero della Francesca profile of a Medici duke. This has become an icon of a new school of Chinese contemporary art post 1989.

So how does this school define itself? What is Chinese about it? What is contemporary? What is the appeal for a western audience?

One art critic has coined the term ''cynical realism'' to describe something which develops pop and kitsch styles in a contemporary Chinese context. Whatever it is, the movement has put Chinese contemporary art centre -- stage worldwide. Where western art is overshadowed by crises of post-modernism and loss of faith in painting, China has found itself an art of real energy, self-belief and historical significance. How? Why? To my eyes this flood of expression seems to emerge from half a century of pent-up, frustrated creativity and individual expression. The artists, the individuals have something to say, and by god, they are going to say it!

We can also sense a feeling that China itself may be tired of being seen (and seeing itself) solely as a super-efficient manufacturing economy, bowing to the all-powerful altar of economic growth. Where is the broader agenda? How is the newly acquired affluence of the urban middle -- class going to be spent? Signs of a shift appear in diverse ways: through the Beijing Olympics -- the desire for athletic and sporting prowess: through the opening of a spectacular new Formula 1 track in Shanghai (while our own decaying UK race track barely clings on to its own slot as a world -- class venue): in your reinvention of China as a series of creative capitals. Look at Shanghai; look at the Pearl River Delta. Look at Hong Kong -- never a great cultural capital in the days of the British (no surprise there), but now intent on turning itself into a cultural landmark (as well as a retail one) through the construction in West Kowloon of one of the largest cultural quarters in the world. This is real cultural regeneration, internal Chinese cultural competition, which must be a positive step.

As I've said, there's much potential for cultural exchange (both import and export) in the visual arts, in design -- and of course in cinema. Hero, for example, by Zhang Yimou (with a score almost inevitably by Tan Dun) is doing great business in the UK.

But when it comes to the performing arts, it seems to me to be a different story. You import our cultural institutions -- western theatre and dance companies, opera companies and orchestras: after all you need ''product'' to fill all your new western-inspired, western shaped arts centres. But though I'm all for the 'two way' trade in Western classical music, it's not on its own going to do much to enlighten one another about our respective contemporary cultures or indigenous traditions.

On the export side it's a different story. Chinese Opera in its varied manifestations (that wonderful Peony Pavilion a few years back, for example.) But ask ''the man in the London street'' for his impression of contemporary performing arts from China, and I suspect you'll be answered in two words: acrobats and circus! (And with the greatest respect to the 'Acrobats Cooperative', there's only so much acrobatic performance I can take -- wherever it's from).

At the Barbican, when the resident Royal Shakespeare Company first left us in 1997 for just a six month annual season, and then in 2002 completely, we have mounted a season, BITE– now year round, of international dance, theatre, opera and multi-media performance, including several co-commissions and co-productions. To date we have presented over 160 productions, from more than 32 countries on both our large and small stages. Would you believe that, to date we have presented nothing from China?! And it's not for want of looking or trying! The nearest we got was in 1998, when we showed a contemporary ''take'' on Peony Pavilion, through the radical eyes of American director Peter Sellars, with Chinese/American actors, and a score by -- guess who -- Tan Dun. It certainly isn't ''authentic'', but it was a compelling piece of contemporary music theatre, with a distinct Chinese aesthetic, which must have done just as much to awaken interest in the genre, as endless presentations of ''authentic'' Chinese opera. There are different ways of opening your cultural heritage to young, contemporary audiences abroad, than turning out constant acrobatic spectacles!

And we have presented the glorious puppetry of New York based Ping Chong as part of a Tan Dun Festival featuring his music and his friends. It is strange how, filtered through the eyes, ears and experience of Chinese living abroad (mostly in the US) -- Tan Dun, Ping Chong, Yo Yo Ma, and so on, Western audiences seem to find their principle way of engaging with Chinese performing arts. Not perfect? Yes, but at least it's an entry point, a catalyst for further exploration. Something for you all here to reflect upon.

So, no China. But we have presented work from Taiwan -- the amazing ''Cloudgate'' company, Dumbtype from Japan -- techno wizardry, dance and multi-media performance: and Sankaijuku and Teshigawara also from Japan, are fairly regular visitors to our North London neighbours at Sadlers Wells. Sadlers Wells have also presented another New York based Chinese artist Shen Wei, and will be presenting Beijing Opera next year.

What do these contemporary works have in common that makes them so popular in London and elsewhere in Europe? I believe they all have their roots in their own indigenous cultures (whether it be butoh, or other dramatic traditions) however tenuous or subliminal the link. In addition, they are also driven by a clarity and singularity of individual artistic vision, much as I was talking about the visual arts earlier. And finally they have all managed to respect their roots, hold to their originality and integrity, and at the same time find a language that speaks to an international audience -- a far cry away from the bland, homogenised cultural soup that we see at Olympic and other cultural spectacles: what I'll call the cultural tourism aesthetic. Raising the Red Lantern, which also reached London, seems to be a step in the right direction. So too the Guangdong Modern Dance Company which came a few years ago. But these are isolated examples.

So -- what would we want to see from China in the coming years by way of performing arts? As an Artistic Director, open to new ideas, I want to see more Chinese work within my programme. I want to see Chinese contemporary dance, I want to see Chinese contemporary theatre. I want Chinese work to feature in the way that we present work from Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere in the region. I want to see Chinese artists (musicians and directors) working in international collaborations both learning and influencing, in major festivals and venues. Plus British artists working here as Mr Yang Shaolin was encouraging yesterday -- working with Chinese artists and production teams, that's real cultural exchange. I want many more Chinese names to be as resonant to Western audiences as are those of Zhang Zimou, Tan Dun, Ping Chong and Yo Yo Ma. I am happy for you to share with us your cultural heritage of fine arts and Chinese opera. Protect your heritage for sure -- it's vital. But invest in the diversity of your contemporary artists. UK audiences are hungry for engaged, expressive, radical and contemporary work, through which we can all begin better to understand the soul and identity of contemporary China. So, in a paraphrase of Johann Zietsman, we'd like to tell you more about our culture: but I'd love to know more about yours and to be able to introduce it to our audience in an intelligent and contextualised way.

I suppose it's too much to expect we will not have that gruesome, gaudy spectacle which passes for ''culture'' at every single Olympiad, when we all meet in Beijing in 2008. But it'd be lovely to think we could move the Chinese performing arts cultural agenda forward through the Olympics, by somewhere appealing to the HIGHEST common denominator and not pandering to the LOWEST. The sports themselves are about individual expression as well as about team expression: they are also about excellence. Let us see this same agenda being applied to all of the arts in China in the decades to come -- both performing and visual.

Is it too fanciful to suppose that in the 21st century Chinese arts will be as popular in the UK as Tea was in the 18th century -- even if it does upset the trade balance by a few million dollars? I have to say that that would be one trade imbalance that I wouldn't lose any sleep over!

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