David Cameron to meet China's Wen Jiabao for business...

David Cameron to meet China's Wen Jiabao for business summit

Centrepiece will be multi-million pound gasification deal, although PM says he will raise human rights issues in private


Patrick Wintour
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 June 2011 19.15 BST
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David Cameron and the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will meet for an Anglo-Chinese summit at Downing Street designed to seal ?1bn worth of bilateral contracts, including a raft of deals aimed at greening the industrial revolution transforming the Chinese economy at an unprecedented rate.

Premier Wen is in the UK for three days. He started his tour in the Midlands on Sunday.

One of the centrepieces of the Downing Street summit will be a multi-million pound commercial underground coal gasification deal secured by Seamwell International, a British company specialising in new clean coal technology.

The technology could release 280bn tonnes of coal in inner Mongolia, at a 20% reduction on the CO2 emissions of a traditional coal fired power station and 50% if carbon capture and storage technology is also utilised.

The two leaders will meet against a backdrop of heavily policed protests at the state of human rights in China and Tibet.

Downing Street has promised Cameron will raise issues such as Tibet firmly in private, but he is expected to tread gingerly, aware that he does not want to jeopardise UK business access to the fastest expanding export market in the world.

During the summit, the UK and China are expected to sign an agreement that will boost British businesses' ability to branch out beyond Beijing and Shanghai, into other fast growing regional cities in China.

The GDP of these regional cities has more than doubled between in just three years.

At the beginning of the year, UK imports to China were only 1% of Chinese exports to the UK.

Number 10 has said that Britain is progressing well on its target of $100bn of bilateral trade by 2015, with British exports to China up by more than a fifth since David Cameron took a large business delegation to Beijing in November.