Relations with China will top the European Union's trade agenda after the current round of WTO negotiations are wrapped up, EU trade chief Peter Mandelson said Thursday.

Mandelson said that he would use

the second half of the year to begin concentrating on the EU's trade priorities after the current so-called Doha round of WTO talks are wound down and that China would get special focus.

World Trade Organization mem-

bers are currently struggling to make progress on the Doha round of trade liberalization, raising doubts that they will be able to clinch a deal as planned by the end of the year.

"China is the biggest single challenge of globalization in the trade field," Mandelson said in speech delivered in Wolfsberg, Switzerland but also distributed in Brussels.

"Europe must get China right -- as a threat, an opportunity and prospective partner," he said.

Mandelson said he would review trade and investment in China in the autumn with aim of analyzing "the impact of China on the global economy, and how the Union should respond."

Intellectual property, market access issues and investment opportunities would in particular get top billing.

Mandelson is to visit China in early June where he is in particular to raise the issue of intellectual property rights, his spokesman Peter Power said.

As China emerges as a major manufacturing powerhouse, Brussels has increasingly struggled to diffuse trade disputes with Beijing.