LONDON - The Shanghai World Expo will be a wonderful opportunity for China, Britain and the world to celebrate common humanity and common achievements, according to China's ambassador to Britain.

For Shanghai, this six-month-long festival, which is set to attract 70 million visitors, is the equivalent of the Olympics in Beijing: a chance to showcase itself to the world, the Chinese Ambassador Liu Xiaoming said in a story published by the Daily Telegraph Friday.

To promote the Shanghai Expo, which opens Saturday, Liu said in the story headlined "The Shanghai Expo is a Worthy Symbol of Today's China" that eight years of hard work had transformed the Expo site along the Huangpu River into a dazzling display of what is best in the architecture, art, science and technology of the world's nations.

Two million young people had come forward to act as volunteers and many were opening their homes to foreign guests so they could understand the lives and thinking of ordinary Chinese people, he said.

The location of the Expo was especially fitting, because Shanghai epitomized China's drive towards modernization over the past 30 years, the ambassador said.

It had also suffered from serious forms of urban excess: over-population, congestion, and pollution, he said.

The challenge for the city, and to a large extent the country, was to make development more sustainable and environmentally friendly while meeting people's aspirations for a better life, he said.

The theme of the Expo -- "Better City, Better Life" -- reflected how hard China was working to upgrade its industrial structure, and shift the economic pattern from the consumption of energy and resources towards sustainable and low-carbon development, Liu said.

The Expo offered Britain a major opportunity to present the best it had to offer, he said.

The British pavilion would go a long way towards updating the old image held by the Chinese of Britain as a cold, foggy country inhabited by people with overcoats and umbrellas, projecting instead an image of Britain as a magnet for ideas, innovation and investment, he said.