"There will be a call for offers during the second half of the year," visiting French Minister of Transportation Dominique Perben told journalists.

Perben said he had been told about the timeframe "very clearly" by senior Chinese officials during a meeting on Thursday.

Perben did not detail what would be put up for tender, but in recent months China has said that the railway line would be built with domestic technology.

"The high-speed railway will be entirely based on our own technology," railway minister Liu Zhijun said in early March.

But when announcing approval of the project in March, the National Development and Reform Commission, China's economic planning agency, also said that China welcomed "foreign investment in the project."

The railway will traverse the 1,300 kilometers (806 miles) between China's two largest cities and is expected to form the basis of 12,000 kilometers of high-speed rail lines to be built around the country by 2020.

The French company Alstom has long been interested in participating in the rail project, as has German engineering giant Siemens AG and Japan's Mitsubishi-Kawasaki.

The project is one of the items on Perben's agenda during his four-day visit to China that began on Thursday.

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