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An employee counts yuan banknotes at a bank in Taiyuan (Reuters)

British Ambassador to China, Sebastian Wood, has told a gathering of economists, policy-makers and entrepreneurs in Beijing that "we welcome the investment from China", reports the China Daily.

Speaking at the FT Chinese Annual Forum 2012, Wood said the UK is looking to come out of the global financial downturn by focusing more on investment-driven growth, rather than on domestic consumption.

"This strategy is the opposite to that of China, because we have spent too much," the China Daily quoted Wood as saying.

Wood's comments follow reports of the Chinese sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corporation's (CIC) investment in Heathrow airport and a host of other deals before that.

The CIC had acquired a 10 percent stake in London's Heathrow Airport for a sum of £450m the previous week.

This was the CIC's second major investment in the UK after the acquisition of an 8.68 percent stake in the UK's utility group, Thames Water.

Earlier reports from the Financial Times had also suggested that that the CIC was in £250m takeover talks for Deutsche Bank's UK headquarters. The head of CIC, Lou Jiwei had indicated in a report published in 2011 by the FT that the fund was looking for more private-public partnerships, said the BBC.

Chinese telecom company, Huawei, too had entered into a £2.5b deal with British Telecom (BT) earlier this year in a bid to expand high-speed broadband services to two-thirds of the houses and offices in the country by 2015.

However, after a US congressional committee said that Huawei posed a significant threat to national security, due to the nature of its relationship with the Chinese government, the UK parliament's intelligence and security committee is reported to be investigating the company's commercial relationship with BT.

Justin Yifu Lin, a former chief economist at the World Bank who also spoke at the FT Chinese Annual Forum 2012, said: "Although developed nations have mature infrastructure networks, there is still big investment potential in the area."

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