Closing out the two-day forum, Premier Wen Jiabao and other top financial officials and planners endorsed a range of measures meant to sustain the high growth rates that have vaulted China to become the world’s fourth largest economy.

New policies included expanding reforms of state banks, with Wen announcing that the debt-laden Agriculture Bank of China will be restructured and greater financial support given to rural China. He also called for wider use of the country’s foreign exchange reserves, now the world’s largest at US$1.06 trillion (euro800 billion) and still growing.

While many of the measures were expected, the financial work conference, held once every five years, comes as the communist government is trying to ease friction at home over a widening rich-poor gap and dampen criticism abroad about its swelling trade surplus.

Wen, in addressing the meeting, acknowledged that domestic social strains and the trade surplus — which ballooned 74 percent to US$177.47 billion (euro135 billion) — and inflows of investment were proving a challenge to manage.

“We must increase the sense of urgency and responsibility in financial work,” state television and the Xinhua News Agency quoted Wen as saying. “We need to promote the continued healthy, safe development of the finance industry to realize good, fast national economic development and construct a socialist, harmonious society.”

China Central Television showed Wen, with senior economic officials at his side, speaking to a large hall of central government and provincial officials. One notable absence was Vice Premier Huang Ju, who, though in charge of financial policies, officials say has been battling cancer for the past year.

Wen ticked off a list of financial sector problems, including poor management at financial institutions and “an intensifying imbalance in the balance of payments.”

With so much money flooding in, Chinese leaders and economists are worried that the surge could touch off inflation or a binge of ill-conceived lending by banks and spending by companies. The trade surplus has also fueled criticism in the United States and European Union that China was depressing the value of its currency, the yuan, making its exports cheaper.

In recent weeks, China has accelerated the yuan’s rise against the dollar, and Wen said that exchange rate adjustments will continue.

Less clear, however, was whether China intended to use its foreign exchange reserves to buy up assets abroad, helping to reduce trade tensions.

The government “must actively explore and broaden the channels and manner of using foreign exchange reserves,” Wen said.

In the run up to the conference, officials and scholars debated how best to spend the reserves, which have usually been invested in U.S. Treasury bonds and other safe, but low-yield investments or used to bail out state banks.

Wen did not say if funds would be injected into the Agriculture Bank, as was done with the three other major state commercial banks, all of which were then restructured and listed on overseas stock markets.

The meeting’s final communique also did not say whether leaders had endorsed much-debated proposals to set up a new state company or to expand the powers of an existing entity to invest the reserves.

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