BERLIN: China's Premier Li Keqiang will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, the third top-level talks this year between the export powers, amid growing disquiet over human rights and business rules.
Berlin and Beijing say they are seeking to bolster their already massive trade and investment links by deepening their governments' strategic partnership at a third joint cabinet meeting and in bilateral business talks.
Merkel will roll out the red carpet and receive Li with full military honours for the visit, during which some 30 cooperation and investment deals worth over two billion euros ($2.5 billion) are expected to be signed in fields including health, education and the environment.
Twelve ministers from Germany and 14 from China will hammer out cooperation in a range of fields from climate change and agriculture to using German green-tech to manage China's breakneck economic growth.
But the meeting comes at a sensitive time, as China grapples with Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests and Germany gears up to celebrate 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9.
Merkel, who grew up under communism in East Germany, invoked the momentous events of 1989 which came months after China's Tiananmen Square crackdown, when she recalled in China in July that the events "enabled us to have a free dialogue".
In her latest weekly video message, Merkel stressed the importance of free speech in the former British colony Hong Kong, handed back to the mainland in 1997, and criticised China's life jail term for a leading ethnic Uighur activist.
Hong Kong government talks with student leaders set for Friday were called off hours after demonstrators on Thursday vowed to ratchet up their protests, plunging the financial hub into fresh crisis.
Chinese senior diplomats told a pre-trip briefing that "we are ready to carry out human rights dialogue and cooperation on the basis of mutual respect and non-interference in other countries' internal affairs", stressing that "the question of Hong Kong is China's internal affair".
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