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China will try to make constructive contribution to the Copenhagen climate summit next month and will not accept it ends with an "empty" declaration, a key Chinese negotiator said Tuesday.

"The copenhagen conference will be a milestone and written into history, therefore, too much expectation has been put on it," said Li Gao, an official with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) who has been a key climate change negotiator representing the Chinese government for years.

"We will try to make the summit successful and we will not accept that it ends with an empty and so-called political declaration," Li said at a forum, two weeks ahead of the long-anticipated summit.

Representatives of about 190 countries will attend the 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from Dec 7 to 18 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The Chinese delegation would leave for Denmark at the end of November, Li said.

The meeting is expected to renew GHG emissions reduction targets set by the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol, the first stage of which is to expire in 2012.

It is also expected to further outline the post-2012 negotiation path.

Li said the conference itself cannot save the earth or solve all the problems, and the world has to continue moving forward.

He said "the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Road Map have always been China's bottom line in international climate negotiations."

The Bali Road Map, agreed by UNFCCC parties in 2007, laid out a two-year process to finalize a binding agreement in 2009 in Copenhagen. It coveres climate-related aspects such as emission cutting, mitigation, forestation, adaptation, financing and technology transfer.

Li said all parties should negotiate under the framework of the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Road Map, "or else the conference would end futile."

The current state of climate negotiations, he said, "has made some progress, but seriously inadequate."

Li's remark came as the United States, a major UNFCCC party, would attend the summit without any domestic legally binding document on quantified target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Pessimism seems to loom large on the congress as negotiations could not produce tangible result when the United States, as one of the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitters, comes unprepared.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed under the UNFCCC regime in 1997 by most UNFCCC parties except the United States, requires developed countries to set clear targets for emission reduction. The European Union, Canada, Japan and Australia, among other developed members, all set respective targets.

The US Senate did not approve the Protocol a dozen years ago.

But an anonymous senior US official said Monday that his country would reveal its specific target soon, so that all nations would put their emission targets on the table of the Copenhagen meeting.

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