RENEE MONTAGNE, host: Britain is taking action to boost its trade ties with China. Prime Minister David Cameron has just led his country's biggest official delegation to the Middle Kingdom in two centuries.</s>RENEE MONTAGNE, host: Vicki Barker filed this report from London.</s>VICKI BARKER: David Cameron was leaving China with several deals already in the bag. Among them, a $1.2 billion contract for Rolls-Royce aviation engines and an agreement that only genuine Scottish whiskey can be marketed in the country as Scotch. That's seen as guaranteeing tens of millions for Scottish distillers. But Cameron avoided public reference to political reform until his final speech to students at Beijing University. There, he extolled the virtues of Britain's parliamentary democracy, where the Opposition Party has a constitutional obligation to hold the government to account, and where a free media tries to do the same. Opening up its own society, Cameron suggested, is in China's best economic interest.</s>Prime Minister DAVID CAMERON (United Kingdom): Because I'm convinced that the best guarantor of prosperity and stability is for economic and political progress to go in step together.</s>VICKI BARKER: At the moment, Germany accounts for about half of Europe's exports into China, and Britain's Finance Minister George Osborne says Britain would like a bigger piece of the action.</s>Mr. GEORGE OSBORNE (Finance Minister, United Kingdom): As we now have a Chinese middle-class emerging, they're going to start to want, I think, British services, British higher-value manufactured products.</s>VICKI BARKER: So far, though, Chinese consumers are buying such high-end German products as Mercedes and BMWs.</s>VICKI BARKER: New figures show Britain is emerging from the global downturn more slowly than Germany or Japan. Analysts say that's largely because it's failed to seize the trade opportunities posed by China's economic resurgence.</s>VICKI BARKER: For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker, in London.
British Prime Minister David Cameron is in China with his top economic ministers on a mission designed to ramp up business there. It's already agreed that only whisky produced in Scotland will be marketed in China as Scotch, a move that some estimate will increase sales by tens of millions of dollars. But Cameron also faces pressure to bring up China's human rights record.