Chinese premier Wen Jiabao left for Europe on January 27 and is expected to focus on how to tackle the global economic crisis during his visit.

His tour will take him to Germany, Spain, the UK and Belgium, where he will visit the European Union (EU) headquarters in Brussels, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu told a regular news briefing yesterday.

He will also travel to Davos in Switzerland to attend the World Economic Forum during his EU visit, which ends on Feb 2.

Wen's visit to Europe will be the first by a Chinese leader after Sino-EU ties soured because of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's meeting with the Dalai Lama early last month.

"We hope Wen's visit will help increase the international community's confidence (in China) and prompt it to tackle the financial crisis jointly," Jiang said.

Sino-French ties suffered a setback after Sarkozy met with the Dalai Lama when France was still holding the rotating EU presidency. That forced China to call off the annual meeting with leaders of EU countries.

Stressing that "the twists and turns of the past are not what we want to see", Jiang said China has always valued its ties with the EU and not changed its policy to establish a comprehensive strategic partnership with the bloc.

Wen's visit to Europe shows the two sides are making efforts to repair bilateral ties, said Professor Wu Baiyi, an expert in European studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"His visit to the EU headquarters is symbolic" after what happened last month.

France is not on Wen's European itinerary because "this is not the proper time for Chinese leaders to visit that country", Wu said. The onus to repair Sino-French ties is now on Paris.

"The Tibet issue concerns China's core interests so there is no ground to compromise." Chinese leaders, he said, may not consider a trip to France till the French government changed its attitude toward the Tibet issue.

Some other analysts, too, said that Wen's Europe visit could solve some existing problems between China and the EU. Trade protectionism is one such problem, said Peking University professor Huo Teh-Ming.

(China Daily January 28, 2009)