The chancellor has warned that Britain must promote science and technology or risk trailing behind China's economic surge.

At the start of his first visit to the Asian power this week, Gordon Brown argued that Britain must tap into the growing market or fall further behind.

Brown is in the country to promote UK trade with China and establish economic and educational links.

As well as meeting ministers, he will visit Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen this week to witness the boom which he believes will dominate the world's economy over the coming decades.

He was set to pay tribute to China "as a major economic player stabilising the world economy", highlighting that, unlike many, he sees the nation's rise as an opportunity, not a threat.

"Without China, trade growth, which slowed more than at any time in recent world downturns, would have ground to a complete halt or gone into reverse," he was to tell the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"China's development helps us understand the need for change and to persuade British people to change.

"In the last industrial revolution Britain realised all too late that other countries were not only catching up with us but doing better in applying technology to products and processes. [This time] we can and must make the major changes necessary to compete."

The Chinese economy has grown more in recent years than the G7 countries combined and Brown was set to argue that it is now evolving into a more advanced stage of its development.

"China's re-emergence as a leader in scientific research should surprise nobody," the chancellor was set to say.

"The country that invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass is now producing two million graduates a year, including 50,000 computer science graduates a year."