China called on Monday for urgent coordinated action to avoid a global economic catastrophe, even as fresh splits emerged within the European Union on dealing with the spiralling crisis.

"When bubbles burst, the world is exposed to disaster," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said during talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London amid fresh reports world wide of job losses and industry bailouts.

"This financial crisis is a global one. No single country can remain immune and address this in isolation. We are sitting in the same boat and we need to all work together to overcome the difficulties," he said.

Wen's comments came amid fears of a rise in protectionism during the crisis, and as China and France pointed to sharp rises in unemployment.

The role of China, backed by its new economic power, is an emerging as an important force in the unfolding economic crisis.

New US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has resumed a long-standing US charge that China keeps its currency artificially low to keep its exports cheap, thereby upholding economic growth.

However, the Chinese economy is now slowing sharply, mainly because foreign demand has dropped.

Economists say that the exchange rate of the yuan is an issue, but warn that US pressure over the exchange rate could alienate China, one of America's biggest creditors, in a year when the US needs to raise as much as 2.5 trillion dollars in new debt through bond issues.

Investor eyes were fixed on Washington this week, where President Barack Obama was pushing his 819-billion-dollar stimulus package through Congress.

The plan was approved by the House of Representatives last week but no Republicans voted for it and it now faces similar opposition in the Senate.

Debt problems also added to divisions within the EU on the crisis, with Germany's central bank chief criticising a proposal by Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti for a European bond to raise credit for crisis-hit EU states.

Axel Weber told the business daily Handelsblatt that such a move by Italy, one of the most indebted countries in the 16-member eurozone, would undermine the disciplinary character of financial markets and euro club rules.

Amid widening divergences on the crisis within the EU, Germany said it would host talks among European leaders while French President Nicolas Sarkozy was reported to be seeking a summit of eurozone countries to forge greater unity.

Germany, Europe's biggest economy, announced last week that unemployment had jumped 387,000 in January and the government on Monday said it was considering "nationalisations" and "expropriation" of private assets to avoid bankruptcies.

Meanwhile the gloom over global job losses and bad economic data spread further on Monday, hitting stocks. The Tokyo stock market fell by 1.5 percent and all Europe's main indices were strongly down in early afternoon trading.

The euro dipped against the dollar as traders bet that the European Central Bank would cut interest rates later this week in a bid to boost ailing eurozone economies and looked to the dollar as a safe haven amid economic worries.

China said that about 20 million rural migrants were now out of work -- more than triple the number announced last month -- in an indication that the slowdown in the world's third-largest economy was intensifying.

Large numbers of Chinese workers have lost their jobs as demand in North America and Europe for the cheap consumer goods made in China has fallen off sharply, forcing thousands of factories to shut their doors.

The sense of gloom in Asia was compounded when South Korea said exports in January were worth 21.7 billion dollars (17 billion euros), a year-on-year drop of 32.8 percent and the biggest such decline since 1980.

Taiwan, a major electronics exporter also hit hard by the slowdown, meanwhile announced a 21 billion dollar stimulus drive over the next four years, hoping to create 150,000 jobs and bring unemployment under 4.5 percent.

In Europe, a new survey indicated manufacturing activity in the eurozone countries also retreated in January while France's Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said that unemployment climbed by 45,000 last month.

"I'd be extremely astonished if we have positive growth in 2009, let's be realistic," she told reporters as Prime Minister Francois Fillon unveiled a new 26-billion-euro (33-billion-dollar) economic stimulus package.

In further crisis fallout, Austria said the unemployment rate rose to 8.3 percent in January and Ireland was reported to be close to injecting eight billion euros (10 billion dollars) of state cash into two ailing banks.