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Hello and welcome to News Air from the BBC World Service. We're coming to you live from London. I'm James Menendez.

And we're going to begin the programme in China and the first visit by a Canadian Prime Minister for nearly a decade.

Relations have been strained in recent years, but today it was all smiles as Mark Carney

and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced what they called a new strategic partnership.

For the moment, it's mostly about forging a new trade deal.

This is how China's Commerce Ministry spokesperson, Her Yongchan,

put it.

Both China and Canada support economic globalization and trade liberalization and share broad

common interests, an enormous cooperation potential in the economic and trade fields.

Currently, China is expanding its high-level opening up,

proactively aligning with high-standard international economic and trade rules,

and steadily expanding institutional opening up.

Among the proposals are, for example, lower Chinese tariffs on certain Canadian

agricultural products, while Canada says it's willing to lower import taxes on Chinese

electric cars. However, Mark Carney dropped several strong hints that there was much more

at stake than levies. It was, he said, about Canada looking

for new, more predictable partners in a changing geopolitical landscape. Canada can thrive in a new

system, but to do so, we must be ambitious. We must work at speed and scale to find new partners,

to diversify our trade and attract

unprecedented levels of investment in our country.

And we must be pragmatic.

...