Simon Haworth tells Tom Pattinson about the rare honour of being given the China Friendship Award and dining at the Great Hall of the People

In 1874, the sooty streets of Manchester housed nearly half a million. The booming textile industry had turned this once sleepy market town into the workshop of the world. Gaslit streets illuminated world-weary travellers hustling their wares between mills and traders. Among them was a man who had recently returned from China, where he had been buying silk to sell to the wealthy mills’ owners of Manchester. It’s unclear how close this 19th-century trader managed to get to the halls of imperial China’s power base but one day, nearly 150 years later, his descendent would be received in China’s Great Hall of the People by the country’s Prime Minister himself.

Simon Haworth is the great, great-grandson of one of the silk traders that used to navigate China’s ancient silk route. And Haworth is now also a pioneer in China-UK trade. He was recently one of a handful of dignitaries to win the prestigious China Friendship Award for his work with China – an award that puts him alongside some of the world’s most notable diplomats, academics and scientists. So how did it all come about?

Haworth works in biotech innovation and only started looking at the China market in 2010. Two years later, he was working in China as the CEO of a bioinformatics company that uses neural networks to analyse big data. He has set up a Sino-UK Fund – a later stage growth capital fund that uses Chinese capital in order to bring technology and products from the UK and Europe into China. This work sees him taking British companies operating in the biotech, agri-tech and green tech areas to China to set up operations and work on test projects. Many companies, he says miss out on the China market because of the perceived complexity of the barriers to entry. The fund invests in European and UK companies in order to help negotiate any barriers and bring them to the Chinese market.

However, it is his work on cross-cultural education that has made this businessman from England stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s most respected philanthropists and thinkers.

They were able to talk about everything from growing potatoes to cross border investment activity

The Dynasty Youth Exchange was established for people aged between 13 and 17 to engage with each other. “We found that people above a certain age have a terrible lack of understanding about each other’s countries – you could say they have prejudices,” says Haworth from his home just west of Cambridge. “Young people don’t have such prejudices – they just start talking.”

The exchange, which aims to eradicate prejudice and misunderstanding between China and the UK, now has up to 1,500 children coming from China to the UK next year to experience a two-week cultural education programme that sees them working and playing together; they don’t simply show the other culture their own traditions. “We have them working on sports or engineering projects or musical projects together as opposed to having one group from China performing a dragon dance and one group from the UK presenting a Shakespeare play.

Haworth’s commitment to China saw him win the provincial level Yellow Crane Award for Wuhan in 2015. “We had to put together a 100-page book of information just to apply for the Award but decided it was worth doing, with encouragement from the local government,” says Haworth. “At the time I didn’t realise that the award might be helpful but people were allocated to help us make use of it,” he says. In 2017 the Wuhan government suggested that they apply for the national award. Following this, there was, says Haworth, various opaque requests for more information and then one day his office in Wuhan received a phone call asking them to come into the offices of the regional Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where they were told they had won the award.

It was not just Haworth’s great, great grandfather who had ties with China. Nearly every generation of Haworth’s since then have had some dealings with the country, including Simon’s own grandparents. “I had vague recollections of my grandparents visiting China but it was only after my recent trips to China that we went into the attic and got out all of granny’s diaries,” Haworth said. “She returned from China in 1964 and she recorded the trips with all these stamps, menus, bills and so on, pasted in to the diaries. Descriptions of all the places she has been and who she met. There was a description of the first bridge that had been built across the Yangtze River in amazing detail.”

Haworth was among 50 winners of the award: “I said to my wife, there appears to be 49 amazing experts plus me,” he says. “The skills and the experience is extraordinary and since the award, I have made a great effort to keep us all linked together. There is a German doctor who had been practising medicine in rural Yunnan for 15 years. Another lady had been deeply involved in museum activity and scientifically interesting sites in China. She was a curator of a museum in the US and well known in academic circles in which she was working. Her name is Mary Gardener Gates – Bill Gates stepmother. It was one of the most enjoyable groups you could possibly imagine.”

The days before the awards ceremony all fifty experts from 21 countries stayed together at the Foreign Experts Hotel in Beijing and were asked to attend a foreign experts’ consultation symposium, where they were asked to give their thoughts and observations about important areas of China’s future and areas for the government to focus on.

“The 50 experts around the table were engaging in detailed discussion about innovation, people, products, globalisation – it was very constructive and the most open discussion I have had in China,” says Haworth. “That’s where you could see the diversity of expertise across the people. They were able to talk about everything from growing potatoes to cross border investment activity. The inputs are taken very seriously and fed into relevant ministries.”

Simon Haworth is the great, great grandson of one of the silk traders that used to navigate China’s ancient silk route

Following the round table, they were taken by police escort to the Great Hall of the People were they were to formally receive the awards. Here they met with Vice Premier Ma Kai and Haworth was presented with the medal and award. Later a lavish banquet was given in the Great Hall before they returned the following day, on National Day, for a dinner for 2,000 people that included Premier Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping, where Li Keqiang spent some time talking with Haworth about cross border activity and the Sino UK Fund.

As well as an incredible honour, Haworth says that it affords an extraordinary level of access and trust. “China is a relationship-based society when it comes to business and this award shortcuts two years of getting-to-know-you.”

Haworth’s son George recently spent three months in Shanghai on an internship making him the sixth consecutive generation of Haworths to work with China. It’s not hard to imagine his own great-grandchildren one day coming across Haworth’s award, which currently sits on his desk beside a photo of him with Premier Li, and telling tales of how he once had dinner with the both China’s Premier and China’s President at the Great Hall of the People.