AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Beijing

Updated at 11.02am:
A senior Chinese central bank official has warned the United States not to blame other countries for its own economic difficulties, a report said on Tuesday.

Li Ruogu, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China, also said in an interview with the Financial Times that foreign pressure would not force China to move faster on freeing up its exchange rate system.

“China’s custom is that we never blame others for our own problem,” Mr Li was quoted as saying.

“For the past 26 years, we never put pressure or problems on to the world. The US has the reverse attitude, whenever they have a problem, they blame others.”

Mr Li warned that external pressure on China to abandon its decade-old peg to the US dollar would only be counter-productive.

“Under heavy speculation we cannot move [towards greater flexibility] and under heavy external pressure we cannot,” he said according to the report.

“So the best environment for us to gradually move towards a more flexible exchange rate is when people don’t talk about it.”

China has been under pressure for months to allow its currency, the yuan, to rise against the US dollar.

The pressure has come especially from the United States, where it is widely held that the “cheap” yuan has cost American jobs on a massive scale.

Chinese officials have consistently resisted the pressure, with central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan saying at an international finance conference in Berlin over the weekend that it was too early to talk about a loosening of the peg.