AFP - China may take "extraordinary measures" to boost its economy beyond a 580-billion-dollar economic stimulus plan announced late last year, Premier Wen Jiabao told the Financial Times.
  
"We may take further new, timely and decisive measures. All these measures have to be taken pre-emptively before an economic retreat," he told the business daily in an interview published Monday.
  
In November, China unveiled a spending package worth four trillion yuan (580 billion dollars) by the end of 2010. It was aimed at boosting domestic consumption amid slackening overseas demand for China's manufactured goods.
  
"We must take forceful steps. Under special circumstances, necessary and extraordinary measures are required," Wen told the FT.
  
"We should not be restricted by conventions. Success or failure depends on the pace and intensity of those measures."
  
He said Beijing would do whatever was necessary to maintain growth at "about eight percent" this year, including possibly using foreign reserves.
  
The eight percent growth target, announced by Wen last week, is traditionally set as the minimum needed in order to create enough jobs and prevent social unrest.
  
China's economy grew nine percent in 2008, slipping back into single digits for the first time in six years as the global crisis took its toll, the government said last month.
  
Wen was due to meet British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London on Monday, on the final leg of a European tour that has taken in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as well as Berlin, Brussels and Madrid.
  
In the interview, Wen repeated his defence of the yuan exchange rate against US accusations that Beijing was manipulating its currency to boost exports, saying it intended to keep it stable at a "balanced and reasonable level."
  
"If we have a drastic fluctuation in the exchange rate of the renminbi (yuan), it would be a big disaster," he said.
  
Wen also told the paper that his government plans to inject 30 billion dollars into the Agricultural Bank of China, up from a previously announced 19 billion dollars.
  
"The China Agricultural Bank is the last among five national banks which is now undertaking a banking reform.... Our decision for this recapitalisation is around 30 billion dollars," Wen was quoted as saying.
  
The Agricultural Bank, China's weakest major lender, has been in the process of restructuring for years, as policy makers have tried to make it fit for a stock listing.
  
This would follow the example of other major Chinese state banks whose initial public offerings were among the largest the world had seen.