Britain’s Prince William takes on diplomatic role in China

BEIJING — Britain’s Prince William visited a museum nestled in a Beijing alleyway as part of the first official visit to mainland China by a senior British royal in a generation.

In addition to visiting the Forbidden City in Beijing where emperors once resided, William met today (March 2) with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of China’s legislature.

William arrived in Beijing late yesterday after a four-day stay in Japan. He travels later today to Shanghai and rounds off his visit to China on Wednesday in the southwest near the border with Myanmar. Interest in his visit among Chinese was expected to be limited without the presence of wife Kate, who is expecting their second child next month.

Early today, William toured a museum located in a restored courtyard dating from the 1890s, and chatted with representatives of charities and some of the young people they work with. The charities are related to his father, Prince Charles: the Prince of Wales’s China Foundation and The Prince’s Foundation for Building Communities.

A 10-year-old child presented William with a hand-drawn picture of a rural scene, and the prince said he would give it to his son: “That will look nice in George’s bedroom.”

William’s engagements in Shanghai include opening an exhibition showcasing British creativity and innovation and meeting with Chinese business leaders; watching students at a secondary school train with Premier League-trained coaches; and meeting Chinese film industry figures. His final stop in China is Xishuangbanna in Yunnan where he will visit an elephant sanctuary and a nature reserve.

William won’t be visiting Hong Kong, which Britain handed back to China in 1997. It was the scene last year of weekslong pro-democracy protests, during which Beijing prevented a parliamentary committee from traveling to Hong Kong to investigate political reform there, saying it did not want Britain interfering in its internal affairs.

Relations between the countries had only recently got back on track after Beijing suspended high-level diplomatic contacts for 14 months after Prime Minister David Cameron met with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in May 2012.

In June last year, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Britain was marked with pomp and ceremony, involving a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and the announcement of 14 billion pounds (S$29 billion) worth of business deals.

William, 32, is expected to be more diplomatic than his grandfather was on the last royal visit in 1986, when China was still opening up to the outside world and most families here didn’t have a television set.

Prince Philip, accompanying Queen Elizabeth II, remarked to a group of British students that he met that if they stayed much longer they would be “slitty-eyed”. The comment was widely picked up in the British press as being offensive to Chinese and still talked about today, but it did not make a mark in China. AP