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TO THE POINT: Immediately after the announcement of the firstquarter economic performance figure on April 16, the central bank de-cided to raise the reserve requirement ratio by another 0.5 percentagepoints to 16 percent, the highest in history, as part of its commit-ment to enforce tightened monetary policy. It will freeze 200 billionyuan ($28.6 billion)in liquidity and bank loans will be further capped.Officials admitted the Chinese economy is facing overall inflation risk,while government intervention into price hikes did not help reduce sur-ging consumer price index (CPI), which surged 8 percent in the firstquarter. The first-quarter export slowdown hurt the gross domesticproduct (GDP) growth, and the government feared international inflati-on could be transferred into China through imports.

By LIU YUNYUN