NEWS that Jaguar Land Rover is contemplating setting up a factory in China should surprise no-one. In the international world of car-making, it always makes sense to have a factory near where your market is.

And as the world’s second-largest economy, China offers one of the biggest markets anywhere.

Even so, workers at JLR’s factory in Halewood may feel just a twinge of unease at the prospect of Freelanders or Evoques rolling off the lines on the far side of the world.

As well as the size of its market, the attraction of China is its low cost base. Western hi-tech giants may have their creative roots in Silicon Valley, California or the dreaming spires of Oxbridge, but their factories are overwhelmingly in China.

If a Chinese factory can produce cars so much more cheaply than in the UK, the suspicion goes, then sooner or later those cars will arrive on our shores undercutting the home-produced product.

Maybe you can never say never, but in fact the omens so far are quite encouraging. Volkswagen has hardly put itself out of business by building cars in China, and barely 15 miles from the JLR at Halewood is one of the success stories of British manufacturing of the late 20th century, the Airbus plant at Broughton near Chester.

Airbus has an order backlog other firms can only dream about, it too is setting up a Chinese line and the roof has hardly fallen in.

Perhaps even more importantly, JLR at Halewood has the know-how to build cars to a competitive standard. And that hard-won know-how is, and always will be, one of its greatest strengths.