Cameron’s office said Thursday’s talks would focus on global affairs and how China can help battle extremism.
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Manchester Airports Group also launched a China cluster meant to provide a British base for Chinese businesses at its nearby business park, Airport City.
Xi Jinping and David Cameron will rub shoulders with football royalty in Manchester on the final day of the Chinese president’s state visit.
The visit has received huge publicity within China, where the ruling Communist Party hopes it will prove China is being accepted by the West as a global superpower. “I can also say, 15 years later, we may catch up with or exceed the United Kingdom”, Mao Tse Tung said in November 1957, just before the start of his Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Manchester has the third largest Chinatown in Europe and around 3,600 Chinese students living in the city and Mr Xi is expected to be given a warm welcome, though a few human rights protests are expected.
During his tour of City’s academy, Mr Xi said that sport was an important part of China-UK exchanges and that China could learn from British football, Reuters reported. “This could have a good effect to kick the door of other countries”. Earlier this year, it broke ranks with the United States by signing up as a founding member of China’s new infrastructure investment bank. “Cameron responded to criticism”.
Mr Xi’s affection for “the handsome game” has moved it up the list of national priorities, with plans to expose more children to the sport. Paul Flynn, a backbench Labour MP, described Britain as a “supplicant fawning spaniel that licks the hand that beats it”.
In a small nod to his own allegiances, Mr Xi will also meet a number of former Reds including Gary Neville during his tour of the City.
However, reports on the visit by worldwide broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC were blacked out in China for several minutes at a time, apparently because Chinese censors objected to their reporting on human rights and other sensitive issues. “I repudiate the contrary, that a good relationship with China can have either talk about human rights and the steel industry or. The stronger our economic, trading, business and other partnerships, the stronger our relationship to have the necessary and frank discussions about other issues”.
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Thomson ReutersBritain’s Prime Minister David Cameron walks in the gardens as he welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping to his official residence at ChequersBEIJING (Reuters) – China hopes to see a united European Union in which Britain plays a prominent role in promoting Chinese relations with the bloc, President Xi Jinping told Britain’s prime minister, making in an indirect plea for the country to remain part of the EU. The sudden thaw has largely been engineered by UK Chancellor George Osborne.
