BEIJING (AP) – Prince William presented China’s president with an invitation from the queen for him to visit Britain this year, as the prince on Monday began the first official trip to mainland China by a senior British royal in a generation.
President Xi Jinping told the prince that he thanked Queen Elizabeth II for the invitation. “I look forward to meeting her majesty and other British leaders during the visit and to jointly plan out the future of Sino-British relations,” Xi said during the meeting in the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s legislature. “The British royal family has great influence, not just in Britain but across the world.”
The prince’s three-day trip to Beijing, Shanghai and southwest China near the border with Myanmar is testing his diplomatic mettle as the second in line to the throne.
He won’t be visiting Hong Kong, the former colony Britain handed back to China in 1997. It was the scene last year of weekslong pro-democracy protests, during which Beijing prevented a British parliamentary committee from traveling to Hong Kong to investigate political reform there, saying it did not want Britain interfering in its internal affairs.
William told Xi and the rest of the Chinese delegation, including Yang Jiechi, the government’s senior foreign policy adviser, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, that he was looking forward to strengthening relations between the countries.