As protests by truckers flared into a third day in China's biggest port city and shippers offered the first indications that trade is being slowed, idled trucks illustrated how inflation worries could gum up the world's No. 2 economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. The truckers' demonstrations and work stoppages, which began Wednesday, are perhaps the starkest sign yet of the widespread public frustration over inflation in China that has persisted despite six months of tightening moves by the government.

China could continue to invest some of its enormous reserves in European government debt, its ambassador to the European Union said Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported. China has recently bought chunks of Spanish and Greek debt, and its companies are investing across broad sectors of the European economy, including in ports, chemical firms and car makers. Two weeks ago, when Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero traveled to China, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged his support for Spanish public finances and its banking sector.

China is accelerating efforts to push its currency deeper into world markets, racing ahead with a series of moves toward a new financial ecosystem with the yuan at its center. A senior Hong Kong monetary official told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that China's central bank is "actively considering" new rules that would make it easier to bring yuan funds raised offshore back onto the Chinese mainland.

As the United States and Europe struggle to get their economies rolling again, China is having the opposite problem: figuring out how to keep its revved-up growth engine from generating runaway inflation, the International Herald Tribune reported. The latest sign that things were moving too fast came on Sunday, when China’s central bank ordered the biggest banks to set aside more cash reserves. The move essentially reduces the amount of money available for loans, and is an attempt to cool down the economy.

Madrid has been forced to make an embarrassing clarification after claims that Spain had secured from China up to €9bn in investment in its troubled savings banks were denied by Beijing, the Financial Times reported. Spanish officials said an “error of communication” had led to reports that China Investment Corporation – one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds – was considering a €9bn investment after José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, met Chinese leaders this week. A CIC official told Reuters that reports in the Spanish media of the investment were false.

Chinese banks may have to raise about 860 billion yuan ($131 billion) of stock over six years to meet stricter capital rules, according to estimates from the industry regulator, a person with knowledge of the matter said, Bloomberg reported. Lenders are likely to need an additional 1.26 trillion yuan in supplementary capital by the end of 2016, the person said, declining to be named because the calculations aren’t public. The estimates, compiled in January, assume economic growth of 8 percent a year and 15 percent credit expansion, the person said.

It turned a few heads Tuesday when an analyst at Fitch was quoted saying that China has a 60% probability of experiencing a banking crisis by 2013, the China Real Time Report blog reported. The analyst, Richard Fox, a London-based senior director at Fitch, told Bloomberg News that Fitch sees risks of “holes in bank balance sheets” should a property bubble burst. The jarring assessment was based on the Macro-Prudential Risk Monitor, a sort of analytical tripwire system that Fitch developed in 2005 to flag potential bank crises.

New Chinese government figures show its national debt load remains low compared with other major economies. But including the debts of local governments and many parts of the state-owned banking sector, as many economists say is proper, shows the constraints facing Beijing in the fight against inflation, its top economic priority, The Wall Street Journal reported. In a report issued during the annual session of the National People's Congress, China's legislature, the Ministry of Finance said central government debt at the end of 2010 was $1.03 trillion.

The chief executive of property developer CapitaLand Ltd.'s China unit said Tuesday that the country's latest measures to cool the property sector, including restrictions on home purchases and reduced land supply for private development, will most likely result in pent-up demand rather than lowering prices, The Wall Street Journal reported. Beijing is concerned about overheating in the real-estate market after months of rising home prices prompted widespread resentment over unaffordable housing.

Russian gas export monopoly Gazprom won the rights to a giant Siberian gas field destined to supply the fast-growing markets of China, a spokesman for the sale organiser said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Victory at the auction will allow Gazprom to extract the field's 2 trillion cubic metres of reserves, enough to supply the world for eight months, and forge deeper ties with China, where the Russian energy giant plans to start exporting gas in 2015.