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China may comprise a quarter of the world's population, and a large proportion of its 1.4 billion inhabitants may be enthusiastic new consumers of imported goods and services, but the country's knowledge of Britain and British products is limited.

"The Chinese are actually interested and favourably disposed to Britain," says Carma Elliot, the UK's Consul-General in Shanghai. "But it's true that, as far as they are aware, our principal exports are Harry Potter, James Bond, David Beckham and the Teletubbies."

So as China stages the biggest ever World Expo in Shanghai for six months beginning this month — spending twice as much on the event as it did on the Beijing Olympics — it's a great opportunity for British business to showcase its products.

"What we need," Elliot says, "is to make it known to the 70 to 100 million Chinese people who are going to attend that there's a great deal more to Britain, from science, research, pharmaceuticals, financial services, advanced engineering, automotive and so on to the creative fields."

At the centre of the UK's efforts will be the £25m pavilion designed by King's Cross-based artist and architect Thomas Heatherwick. His startling creation is not so much a building as an art installation-cum-performance. It takes the form of a slightly rounded giant cube, bristling with 60,000 7.5 metre-long transparent acrylic rods and it became the talk of Shanghai from the moment it became visible in early spring from the city's Lupu Bridge, which overlooks the Expo site — at 5.3sq km, more than twice the size of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens combined.

Although relatively small in scale — about the size of six double-decker buses, three on top of three — the pavilion has already been compared in terms of its impact to the Eiffel Tower, which was built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. Emphasising a green as well as a technological theme, the pavilion's rods each have embedded in them a seed from the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany (a partner of Kew's Millennium Seed Bank) — hence the structure's official title of the Seed Cathedral. It stands on a giant, artificial grass-covered crumpled concrete sheet of ‘wrapping paper', symbolising that it's a gift from Britain to China. For good measure, the 60,000 rods each light up at night with low-energy LEDs, and wave in the breeze.

"Seven million or more Chinese people will be walking through our pavilion," says Elliot, "plus tens of millions more will visit online. When you're young and you go to some amazing event like Expo, you are hyper receptive. What young, increasingly worldly Chinese people pick up from the British pavilion they could take with them for the rest of their lives. In concrete terms, that means they have the potential to be keen consumers of British products for life."

The interior of the pavilion is deliberately light on content, as it is designed as a subtle way of conveying to the Chinese public that Britain is creative and innovative. There is a broad ecology theme that doesn't promote any specific UK company — not even founding sponsors GKN, Barclays, Astra Zeneca, BP and Diageo. The idea is that, having sold the idea of the UK to the Chinese people, and created a massive marketing and communications opportunity, a multitude of deals between British businesses and Chinese customers will be closed offsite.

The hub for all this deal-making will be the fifth floor of the plush JW Marriott hotel, which is close to central hotspot People's Square, yet within less than 30 minutes' drive or subway ride of the Expo site. However, there will also be Expo-based, but largely commercially-motivated, events taking place wherever the UK has a diplomatic presence in China — from Beijing to Guangzhou, Chongqing, Hong Kong and Taipei.

Expos are described as an economic, cultural and scientific Olympic Games, and the British team believes that Shanghai's will provide a key opportunity to showcase UK strengths as the restructuring of the Chinese economy gathers speed.