China and climate change take stage at APEC

By Bill Tarrant

SYDNEY (Reuters) - China takes the spotlight at the Asia-Pacific leaders forum on Thursday when President Hu Jintao meets President George W. Bush and Australia's prime minister to talk about security, product safety and climate change.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, after getting backing from Bush on Wednesday over the Iraq war and climate change, will meet Hu.

Howard has drafted a Sydney Declaration on climate change that appears to have undergone some revisions since the original draft was leaked by activist groups last month.

The draft calls for "aspirational" energy efficiency targets, rather than binding ones and transferring emissions technology to help developing APEC economies adapt to climate change, senior APEC officials say.

It calls for increasing forests in the region and recognizes a role for nuclear energy, clean coal technology and renewable energy sources.

Developing economies -- including China -- are strongly opposed to any wording that commits them to binding targets and some say they would prefer climate change goals be handled at a U.N. meeting later this month.

Howard and Hu will also talk about plans to launch bilateral security talks next year, despite lingering human rights issues.

The decision comes after Japan proposed an alliance of Asian democracies that would also include Australia and India, viewed by some analysts as an attempt to contain China.

This month the navies of the United States, India, Japan, Australia and Singapore are staging exercises in the Bay of Bengal.

"China is a good partner of Australia," Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told reporters on Wednesday.

"Whatever the differences there are between us in terms of our political systems, human rights issues, China is a very important part of the strategic architecture, the security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region."

Bush meets Hu later on Thursday and says he expects to have robust discussions with him on everything from China's huge trade surplus with America, climate change, jailed dissidents, Beijing's support for Mynamar's junta, the Dalai Lama and Iran.

"I will sit down with the President and have a good honest, candid discussion, and he's going to tell me what's on his mind and I'm darned sure going to tell him what's on my mind," Bush said at a news conference with Howard on Wednesday.

China's military is the world's biggest, but also one of the most secretive.

Some political analysts have said the United States has been sacrificing its relationship with allies in Asia to focus on the Middle East and Iraq, but Bush denied that China would dominate the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum meeting going on in Sydney.