Plans to launch a high-level New Zealand-China Partnership Forum in Beijing this year are likely to be put back to next year in order to allow China's incoming new leadership to deal with other international issues first, a senior New Zealand official told Xinhua Friday.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key had hoped to lead a delegation to launch the forum to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations this year, but it was now hoped the visit could take place in the first half of 2013, New Zealand China Council chairman Sir Don McKinnon said.

"The forum or the likelihood of the prime minister going to China before Christmas is almost zero now," McKinnon told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.

"With there being a new leadership and a new cast of players and a lot of people wanting to meet the new leadership, we decided to take the advice of our Chinese contacts and move it to next year."

The New Zealand side of the forum would include "top exporters to China, people that have engaged with China at a variety of levels" and those involved in "investment, science, education, culture and Maori interests," said McKinnon, who was New Zealand's deputy prime minister from 1990 to 1996 and the country's longest- serving minister of foreign affairs and trade from 1990 to 1999.

"We will partner with a Chinese organization that has got linkages with the government and with a lot of the large businesses and SOEs," he said in a phone interview.

"Any corporate entity going into China has to get those relationships right. Our priority is to get that primary relationship and to get the imprimatur of the Chinese government."

The New Zealand China Council was formed in July as part of the government's "New Zealand Inc" strategy for expanding trade and other links with China.

"It's an umbrella body that shades none," he said, describing its aim as to include all sectors with interests in developing the New Zealand-China relationship.

"Our job is to assist them, to work with them and, at the same time, to remain very strategic," he said.

"Our priority is to be getting structures in place now to enhance the relationship in the future."

New Zealanders tended to see such relationships "more in terms of a transactional nature rather than a broad strategy."

"Big companies like (New Zealand dairy giant) Fonterra have a pretty clear strategic goal, but we want to get other players in the Chinese market and give them coverage," he said.

The organization was considering setting up an advisory council that would draw on the expertise of those already working with China to ensure the success of the New Zealand government's China strategy.

"We're not the government, but we're not purely the private sector we're in between," said McKinnon.

The council would also promote Chinese investment in New Zealand, which was in need of "enormous amounts of investment."

After the controversy this year surrounding Shanghai Pengxin's purchase of 16 North Island dairy farms, which led to calls for tighter controls on foreign ownership of productive farmland, the council realized that there was a requirement to "explain these things better," said McKinnon.

Prime Minister John Key launched the "NZ Inc China Strategy" in February with the aim to double two-way trade with China to 20 billion NZ dollars (16.33 billion U.S. dollars) by 2015, a goal agreed with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010.

New Zealand was the first developed economy to have free trade agreement in place with China, signed in 2008.

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