BEIJING - French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, hoping to burnish her foreign-policy credentials, opened a visit to China on Saturday by urging France to see China's rising economic power as an opportunity.

French Socialist Presidential candidate Segolene Royal visits the Great Wall of China in Badaling, on the outskirts of Beijing January 6, 2007. [Reuters]

"China is a huge market for French companies that demonstrate perseverance, creativity, will," Royal told reporters while touring the Great Wall, after an overnight flight from France.

Her three-day visit comes as China has emerged as a controversial issue in the French presidential contest between Royal, a Socialist, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the French right. China has come to symbolize the threat globalization poses to French jobs and well-funded social benefits, as well as being criticized for human rights abuses.

In a hint of the challenges Royal faces, the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders urged her to raise China's jailing of journalists and Internet censorship while in Beijing.

Royal, a foreign-policy neophyte who has not held a top government post, was scheduled to meet on Sunday a senior Communist Party official in charge of foreign affairs, her only meeting with Chinese officials in a weekend largely given to sightseeing and photo opportunities.

She was scheduled to meet Monday with a member of the senior leadership, amid visits with Chinese students and a stop-off at a French telecommunications research center.

"It is important to get out and get away from the national debates to realize what's at stake internationally, and also to see how France is perceived, listened to and respected abroad," Royal told reporters Saturday.

Royal said last week that France has a euro15 billion (US$19 billion) trade deficit with China and that Germany exports four times more to China than France does.