CRI听力:"Icebreakers" Hold Chinese New Year Dinner 2015

The 48 Group Club is an organization established more than 60 years ago. The initiators of the Group are hailed as the "Icebreakers" within British economic circles, devoted to pushing forward China-UK friendship.

The annual banquet ahead of the Chinese New Year has been held for decades, but attendance is way up this year.

Leading global economist Gerard Lyons, Chief Economic Advisor to the Mayor of London, says he believes more and more people are starting to realize the importance of a good China-UK trading relationship.

"And in terms of China, it is very important for Britain to have very strong, positive relation with China, and indeed for London to have strong positive relationship with China. So the UK is continuing to not only boost trade flows with China, but also trying to encourage more Chinese investment into the UK."

Britain, China's second biggest trading partner in the European Union, recorded a trade volume of more than 80 billion US dollars last year.

Compared with the relatively weak EU foreign trade status, Sino-British bilateral trade is considered a major success.

Lyons is paying close attention to the new draft of the foreign investment law recently issued in China, as well as the growing need for foreign investment in the British domestic market. He believes cooperation and coordination between China and the UK is a win-win situation. The advisor takes infrastructure construction as an example.

"UK needs to develop its domestic infrastructure, first and for most building infrastructure, weather it's private of public or combination of public and private. Then in addition to that, if the money comes from overseas, than that's also to be welcome. So I think it's a positive development that China is keen to put money into the UK."

Stephen Perry is the Chairman of the 48 Group Club.

"China will develop the world in a way that we have not yet began to anticipate, that the opportunity for British companies to be within that is really very very attractive."

For CRI, I'm Niu Honglin