China's central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan said on Friday China had made progress in trying to cool down its booming economy but that it was too soon to judge if a so-called soft landing had been achieved.
"Up till now we have already found some good soft landing phenomena but it is still too soon to say that we have already reached the soft landing," he told reporters during a visit to the central bank of Slovenia.
"We are going to observe further for the next few months about the key economic indicators. But it seems that we already have this package, quite a large package of policy changes."
Asked if China planned to raise key interest rates after the US Fed moved this week, he said, "We are not very hurried to follow Alan Greenspan's changes."
Speculation is rife China could raise interest rates for the first time in nine years as the government ramps up efforts to cool the sizzling economy.
China has struggled to slow its economy, which grew 9.8 percent over the year to the first quarter, with excessive investment and credit growth in recent months helping fuel inflation.
China's efforts received a vote of confidence from US Treasury Secretary John Snow, who said on Friday that China was taking necessary steps to curb inflation.
Interviewed on Bloomberg radio, Snow played down concern that a slowdown in China's economy might spill over into the United States and contribute to slower US job growth.
"I think they're going to avoid the so-called hard landing that's the real concern," Snow said. "They're clearly taking steps to cool the economy down."
China's economy is the world's sixth biggest and has been a major source of global demand for everything from iron ore to airliners.
So far, China has taken fairly modest measures to slow soaring investment and money growth, fearing an interest rate rise could send ailing state firms to the wall and lure more hot money into China, putting more unwanted upward pressure on the currency.
China has already raised bank reserve requirements three times and tried to curb investment projects to put growth on a more sustainable footing.
Zhou said the target growth rate for China's gross domestic product (GDP) was eight percent in the coming years.
"We believe that in the first half of this year the GDP growth must be somewhere over 10 percent, partially because in the last year there was the Iraq war and the SARS (epidemic). At that time the growth rate was low, so for the first half of this year it must be quite high."
"For the whole year (2004) many economists project somewhere about nine percent GDP growth rate. The target growth rate for China is somewhere around eight percent in the next three to five years," Zhou said.
In his radio comments, Snow also said he hoped China would speed up a move toward currency flexibility.
The US Treasury chief said he hoped Chinese authorities would "use this as an opportunity to move to greater flexibility in the yuan," the Chinese currency whose value now is pegged to the US dollar.
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