Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a joint cabinet meeting of the Asian and European export powers next week, Berlin said Wednesday.

Beijing will next Friday send 14 cabinet ministers, and Germany 12, to their third joint government consultations.

It is a format Germany has with only a handful of countries -- others are India and Israel -- and which is unique for China.

Merkel and Li will also attend the Sino-German Forum for Economic and Technological Cooperation during the October 10 visit to Berlin before dining together, said German government spokesman Steffen Seibert.

The next day Li is set to address another bilateral business forum, in the northern port of Hamburg, organisers say.

China, the world's number two economy, is Germany's second-biggest export market outside Europe after the United States.

Germany, Europe's largest economy, sold goods worth 67 billion euros ($91 billion) to China last year, while imports from the Asian giant topped 73 billion euros.

Li's visit comes after Merkel in July visited China, her seventh official trip there since taking office in 2005, during which both sides signed a string of business deals, including for two new Volkswagen plants and the sale of 123 Airbus helicopters.

Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Berlin in March, when both sides vowed to deepen their "strategic partnership".

Li travels to Berlin as global attention is focused on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China since Britain handed back its former colony in 1997.

Merkel on her Beijing visit raised human rights publicly, unlike many Western visitors, when she spoke about the importance of "free dialogue" in China while invoking the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter century ago.

Seibert said this week about the Hong Kong protests that "freedom of expression in Hong Kong has a long tradition" and that "Hong Kong has done well under this arrangement".

"It is a good sign that so many people have expressed their views peacefully and our hope is that the government forces in Hong Kong will react calmly and protect the rights of citizens to peaceful expression."