BEI­JING-Eu­ro­pean Union lead­ers urged Chi­na yes­ter­day to open its mar­kets, join in per­suad­ing Iran to ne­go­ti­ate over its nu­clear pro­gramme and help end blood­shed in Syr­ia as they held a sum­mit de­layed by Eu­rope's debt cri­sis. Lead­ers of the two sides pledged to boost trade and to start ne­go­ti­a­tions on an in­vest­ment treaty. But at a news con­fer­ence, EU of­fi­cials and Chi­nese Pre­mier Wen Ji­abao ex­pressed dif­fer­ences on is­sues from trade to hu­man rights.

Eu­ro­pean Coun­cil Pres­i­dent Her­man Van Rompuy said he and Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion Pres­i­dent Jose Manuel Bar­roso pressed dur­ing talks with Wen for Chi­na to open its mar­kets. "I re­peat­ed­ly stressed the need for a lev­el play­ing field for Eu­ro­pean busi­ness, in­clud­ing bet­ter mar­ket ac­cess for Eu­ro­pean com­pa­nies, pro­tec­tion of in­vest­ment and in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and our con­cerns about pro­tec­tion­ism," said Van Rompuy.

Eu­rope is Chi­na's biggest trad­ing part­ner but Eu­ro­pean com­pa­nies and busi­ness groups com­plain Bei­jing is try­ing to lim­it their ac­cess to promis­ing in­dus­tries and fa­vors Chi­nese ri­vals in vi­o­la­tion of its free-trade pledges. The sum­mit came af­ter rat­ing agency Moody's on Mon­day down­grad­ed its cred­it rat­ings on Italy, Por­tu­gal and Spain. France, Britain and Aus­tria kept their top rat­ings but their out­looks dropped to "neg­a­tive" from "sta­ble," mean­ing they too might be down­grad­ed.

The meet­ing was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for Oc­to­ber but was post­poned due to emer­gency meet­ings on the Eu­ro­pean debt cri­sis. Chi­na's stake in Eu­rope's eco­nom­ic health has in­creased as Chi­nese com­pa­nies step up in­vest­ment there. The biggest Chi­nese pro­duc­er of con­struc­tion equip­ment agreed this month to ac­quire Ger­many's Putzmeis­ter, a mak­er of con­crete pumps. Wen, ap­pear­ing with Van Rompuy and Bar­roso at the Great Hall of the Peo­ple, the seat of Chi­na's leg­is­la­ture, said Bei­jing is ready to "in­crease its par­tic­i­pa­tion" in re­solv­ing Eu­rope's debt cri­sis but made no fi­nan­cial com­mit­ments.

Wen said ear­li­er this month dur­ing a vis­it by Ger­man Chan­cel­lor An­gela Merkel that Bei­jing was con­sid­er­ing con­tribut­ing to two Eu­ro­pean bailout funds but the gov­ern­ment has giv­en no in­di­ca­tion of progress to­ward that. On glob­al af­fairs, Van Rompuy said the EU sup­port­ed ef­forts of the Arab League to end vi­o­lence in Syr­ia and ap­pealed to "all mem­bers of the UN Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil" - a group that in­cludes Chi­na - to "act re­spon­si­bly."

AP