PRAGUE (AP) -- Five months after China snubbed an EU summit, Premier Wen Jiabao and European Union officials are getting back to business with talks Wednesday focusing on trade and promoting measures to fight global warming.

Wen was greeted by around a hundred Chinese citizens outside Prague castle, who waved Chinese and Czech flags and held banners saying “we love you, the Chinese people love you.”
The meeting between Wen and European Union officials in Prague follows China's cancellation of a December summit because French President Nicolas Sarkozy met the Dalai Lama.
Beijing's wrath over French contact with a man it accuses of seeking Tibetan independence from Chinese rule saw France frozen out of a multibillion EU shopping spree by Chinese companies in February that spent $13.6 billion on contracts.
Chinese officials are now promising more shopping trips to shower money in recession-hit Europe -- but in return stressed that they want to see Europe resist any new trade barriers.
While China may escape a recession this year, it will suffer from plunging exports to the U.S. and the 27-nation EU. Europe is China's biggest export market and was worth euro248 billion last year -- dwarfing the EU's euro78.4 billion in exports to China.
Trade with China has long been a tense topic in Europe where some nations and industries see a flood of cheap imports as unfairly undercutting them. Their calls for protectionism are opposed by retailers and companies that depend on low-cost Chinese manufacturing.
European companies also want China to do more to open up its economy to foreign businesses, saying caps on foreign investment and intellectual property rights violations lose them billions of euros in yearly sales.
With global trade in freefall, the EU's answer is for China to join it on the world stage in pushing for a new global trade deal. Negotiations on the long-stalled pact broke down last year when the U.S., India and China would not accept a compromise draft.
Climate change is a smoother topic for both sides. China is likely to overtake the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases but it is trying to curb this by investing in wind power, nuclear energy and carbon storage.
China's biggest source of cheap power is coal and it wants to mitigate a massive rollout of coal powered electricity plants by using 'near zero' technology to strip out the carbon dioxide emissions and bury them.
The Wednesday summit will see the EU and China both commit to setting carbon capture and storage projects and to demonstrating them to other nations ahead of talks on a climate change accord in Copenhagen later this year.
The EU also said it will ask China to press the military leaders of Myanmar to drop charges against pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and free her from house arrest. China has close diplomatic and economic ties with Myanmar's junta, but has always refused to criticize it.
Human rights activists plan small protests in Prague during the summit to highlight human rights abuses in China. Members of the Falun Gong -- a spiritual movement that Beijing calls an evil cult -- will demonstrate outside the Chinese embassy and Amnesty International will hold a 'parallel summit' with groups critical of China.
Photo:
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso (R) stands next to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at the EU-China Summit in Prague Castle May 20, 2009. (Reuters/Petr Josek)