China says grows stronger amid financial crisis

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese financial institutions have grown stronger in profitability and risk-resisting ability amid the global financial crisis and the financial system "is sound and safe," Premier Wen Jiabao said on Sunday.

Wen said that the "world economic situation" had seen dramatic changes and that the U.S. subprime crisis was having "an increasingly serious negative impact on the world's financial market and the world economy as a whole," Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying.

Maintaining "quite fast" growth was the biggest contribution China could make to help the world economy overcome the financial crisis, the country's central bank said on Saturday.

Welcoming the passage of the $700 billion bank bailout plan in the United States, the People's Bank of China said it was "fully confident" that China could sustain economic growth and financial stability.

"Under multiple negative factors, both international and domestic, China has reacted actively and properly, made efforts to improve the predictability, pertinence and flexibility of macro-economic control policies and timely solved outstanding problems in economic development," Wen was quoted as saying during a tour of Guangxi autonomous region in southwest China.

"As a result, the country's economy has maintained its momentum of smooth and rapid development," Wen said.

Generally speaking, China's economic foundations had not changed and the economy was developing toward the preset "macro-control" targets.

"We have full confidence in China's economic development and financial stability," Wen said. "It is the biggest contribution to the world when a big country with a population of 1.3 billion is able to maintain a lasting, smooth and fast economic development."

(Reporting by Nick Macfie; Editing by Richard Balmforth)