China should consider shifting newly added foreign exchange reserves into strategic commodity reserves such as oil, a leading think-tank said in remarks published on Wednesday.
"We suggest that part of newly added foreign exchange reserves should be used every year to purchase oil or other strategic resources from abroad," the Academy of Macroeconomic Research said in a report published in the official China Securities Journal.
The academy is part of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission.
China should also expand the scope of its foreign exchange reserves and introduce structural changes to the way they were managed to reflect changes in domestic and global markets, it said.
In a separate report, the paper also cited an influential government economist, Xia Bin, as saying that China should buy more gold, when the price was right, to help slow the rise in its foreign exchange reserves.
Xia was also cited as saying that China should ideally hold around $700 billion in foreign exchange reserves.
He made the same comments in a report published by Reuters on Monday.
China's reserves, the world's largest, stood at $853.6 billion at the end of February.
Speculation has been mounting that China may increasingly turn its back on US-dollar denominated assets, especially treasury bonds.
The lengthy NDRC think-tank report on China's economic outlook in 2006 also said that the country's economy was likely to grow 9.3 percent in the first half of 2006 and around 9 percent for the year as a whole.