Mrs May wants to show that the United Kingdom remains “open for business, that we will continue to be a strong and dependable partner”.
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But a planned bilateral meeting with Mr Xi may be awkward as the British Government reviews whether to go ahead with the £18 billion Hinkley nuclear power project, which China is heavily invested in.
Mrs May will have a meeting with president Xi on Monday after the conclusion of the two-day summit in Hanghzou.
Although a decision on whether or not the Hinkley Point C project in Somerset will go ahead is expected this month, United Kingdom officials indicated it would not be announced at the meeting with the Chinese leader – fuelling speculation the plan will be scrapped or significantly altered. “We have set out the government’s approach to Hinkley, which is that we are now considering all the component parts”.
As she boarded her RAF Voyager plane at Heathrow on Saturday morning, the Prime Minister said: “This is a golden era for UK China relations, and one of the things I will be doing at the G20 is obviously talking to President Xi about how we can develop the strategic partnership that we have between the UK and China”.
“I would expect that she would really want try to use this opportunity to reassure the Chinese that Hinkley Point C doesn’t mean that [Britain] does not want a good relationship with China”, he said.
During the summit, Mrs May will also hold her first face-to-face talks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and is expected to adopt an approach of “hard-headed engagement” especially on the issue of Russian bombings in Aleppo, Syria.
“The message for the G20 is that Britain is open for business, as a bold, confident, outward-looking country we will be playing a key role on the world stage”, she added in a statement.
Rather than meet the European leaders with whom she will lock horns with over the coming years to define Britain’s future ties to the EU, Ms May will focus her attention in Hangzhou on courting non-EU countries with an eye on future trade deals.
Her meeting with her Indian counterpart Narendra Modi is expected to be dominated by trade talks.
But amid reports that the planned United States trade deal with the European Union has stalled, the UK hopes for talks on a transatlantic agreement of its own with Washington.
But Ms May did not hesitate to use the words as she travelled to her first major worldwide summit – where she will do her best to convince other world leaders of the merits of Brexit.
The Prime Minister will warn all members of the G20 that Islamic State militants who are being forced out of strongholds in Libya, are looking to find new safe havens in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa.
The former Conservative security minister, Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, revealed in a radio interview that day-to-day security issues needed to be ironed out regarding how Hinkley would be run.
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Barry Gardiner, the shadow energy secretary, said: “I don’t think [May’s] going to allow the Chinese to do Sizewell and Bradwell”.
