Euro Crisis Weighs On Merkel's China Trip

German Chancellor Angela Merkel this week makes her second trip of the year to China, with the Eurozone debt crisis taking center stage as it begins to drag on the two global economic powers.

Merkel was due to take nine ministers with her and a high-powered business delegation for the visit Thursday and Friday to Beijing and Tianjin which includes talks with Premier Wen Jiabao and a joint cabinet meeting.

And with the near three-year-old Eurozone debt crisis showing signs of spreading even as far as China, Beijing increasingly sees Germany and Merkel as key players in tackling the problem, say analysts.

"The euro crisis seems to have led to an increased Chinese focus on Germany in particular," Hans Kundnani from the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, told Agence France Presse.

Chinese officials "see Germany playing an increasingly decisive role in EU decision-making and therefore feel they have little choice but to approach Europe through Germany," he added.

"We have noticed that there is a tendency for her to speak for Europe. China is increasingly looking to her for answers," said the expert.

Europeans have expressed hope that China could deploy some of its huge foreign currency reserves to invest in EU bailout funds, although there is little sign of this happening as yet.

Nevertheless, at an EU-China meeting in Beijing in July, Dai Bingguo, the Chinese co-chair of the talks, pledged that "China is sincere and firm in supporting European efforts to deal with the sovereign debt problem."

"We need to persuade China -- like other investors -- that the funds are safe," a German government source said on Tuesday, noting that Beijing had already taken a write-down on its Greek investments.

Germany and China will also be looking to strengthen their own economic ties, amid signs both are being affected by the Eurozone crisis.

In its latest report on China, the International Monetary Fund warned the crisis was the biggest external risk facing the fast-growing economy.

And after initially proving resilient to the crisis, forward-looking indicators suggest Germany, Europe's top economy, is beginning to feel the pain as well.

Germany is China's top trade partner in the EU with nearly half of all European exports to China coming from Germany. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of all EU imports from China land in Germany.

Bilateral trade between the two powers reached $169 billion in 2011, an 18.9-percent rise on the previous year.

Gu Junli, an expert in Germany at the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said the focus would be at least as much on bilateral economic cooperation as on Europe's sovereign debt crisis.

"Germany's technology has a dominant position, but it needs a market and China is a big market," said Gu, citing energy, environmental protection and manufacturing as possible areas of cooperation.

Reports in the German press have raised the possibility that European plane manufacturer Airbus could win a large order from China during the visit.

However, Merkel was also expected to raise non-economic issues with Wen, including Syria, human rights and freedom of the press.

China has joined Russia in repeatedly using their vetoes to scuttle U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at tackling the deadly conflict in Syria, putting them at odds with western powers.

And Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters Monday the chancellor would raise the issue of the freedom of the press with Wen amid complaints of a "deteriorating situation" for German journalists in China.

German journalists working in China wrote a letter to Merkel saying authorities in Beijing had been "willfully obstructing" their work by threatening not to renew their visas and intimidating local assistants.

"We just request the same working conditions that Chinese journalists enjoy ... in Germany," the reporters wrote.

A German official confirmed that the topic of human rights would also be on the agenda, amid pressure on Merkel to raise the issue of Tibet.

"Human rights are always on the agenda and this has not changed. There is a very trusting relation between the chancellor and Premier Wen, which means that topics like this can be discussed," the official said.

"That does not mean that this will be discussed in detail publicly afterwards," added the official, who requested anonymity.