Britain’s treasury chief made a pitch yesterday for Chinese banks to expand in London as he visited Beijing amid strains over Tibet and China’s trade surplus.
“We welcome participation by Chinese banks and other financial institutions,” British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling told China’s top finance reform official, Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山), as they began talks on financial cooperation.
“We want to contribute to the evolution of China’s financial markets,” Darling said.
Wang said Beijing wanted closer financial cooperation to jointly address global challenges. He said that included protecting the financial system “because of the continuous deepening of the US subprime crisis.”
Darling is the highest-ranking British official to visit China since Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office said last week he would skip the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in August.
Brown’s decision came amid demands by activists for foreign leaders to boycott the ceremony in protest over Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Tibet. But the prime minister’s office said the decision was unrelated to those demands and was not a gesture of protest.
Darling was in Beijing as part of a high-level British-Chinese dialogue on economics and finance. He was accompanied by executives of British and European banks and a London private equity firm.
Darling was expected to meet with the chairman of China’s US$200 billion state investment fund and lobby for investment in Britain.
Brown visited Beijing in January and made a similar invitation.
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