CORRECTED-UPDATE 1-Airbus denies summit row bad for China deals

(Corrects number of planes confirmed from last year's China order to 140 from 120 in paragraph 12, adds quote on negotiations for others)

* Airbus denies EU summit row scuppers China plane deal

* Says China-EU summit not a forum to negotiate plane deals

* Airbus China says says no big order is expected soon

PARIS/SHANGHAI, Nov 27 (Reuters) - European planemaker Airbus (EAD.PA) said on Thursday it had "strong" ties with China and did not expect the cancellation of a China-EU summit to upset future aircraft negotiations.

It also denied a French media report that China's decision to withdraw from next Monday's summit with the European Union had scuppered an imminent multi-billion dollar plane order.

China has blamed French President Nicolas Sarkozy's planned meeting with the Dalai Lama for pulling out of the summit which may have forged a joint response to the global economic crisis.

"We have very strong ties with China through our final assembly line in Tianjing, and the training and engineering centre in Beijing, and we have more than 450 aircraft flying in China with 12 customers," Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said at the company's headquarters in Toulouse, France.

"Our contacts with customers take place at many levels and these political platforms are not foreseen for negotiations."

In Beijing, an Airbus spokesman denied a report in French daily Les Echos that the summit row would lead to the indefinite postponement of a major purchase lined up for next week.

"It's completely untrue," said Airbus China spokesman Tao Wenge. "It is the Chinese Premier who will postpone the trip. We are not planning to sign any big aircraft order during the summit anyway, nor is any big order expected soon."

France confirmed Sarkozy would meet the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, at a Dec. 6 ceremony in Poland to mark the 25th anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize to former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

China earlier this month warned Sarkozy the EU risked losing "hard-won" gains in ties with Beijing if he met the Dalai Lama, whom China brands a separatist.

China historically places major plane orders during bilateral summits with France, which can coincide with high-level European Union meetings with China.

France currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.

China placed an order for a total of 160 Airbus jets during a state visit by Sarkozy to China a year ago, the largest ever single order for Airbus planes in volume terms, but only 140 of these have been confirmed so far on the Airbus order book.

Airbus said "negotiations are proceeding well" for the remaining 20 planes.

Plane orders have dropped sharply since the middle of the year due to the global financial crisis and few analysts expect orders on the scale of China's recent purchases, which were designed to fuel the world's fastest-growing aviation market.

Still, aviation as well as other agricultural and industrial goods have been used in the past as a lever in diplomatic relations between China and Europe.

In the 1990s, China stopped buying Airbus planes and French wheat for several years after France sold arms to Taiwan, though Airbus at that stage had a lower stake in the Chinese market.

Airbus now plans to assemble single-aisle planes in China from 2009 as part of efforts to diversify its operations and this year started shipping parts to an assembly plant in Tianjin.

(Reporting by Tim Hepher, Fang Yan; Editing by Andrew Macdonald and Erica Billingham)