On a day of eye-popping economic data, the customs bureau said the accumulated surplus from January to September was 185.7 billion dollars, exceeding the 177.5 billion dollars for all of last year.

The swelling surplus helped China's foreign exchange reserves, already the world's largest, to surge 45.1 percent in the first nine months of the year to 1.43 trillion dollars, the central bank said.

After three record monthly trade surplus figures in June, July and August, September's 23.9-billion-dollar surplus was the fourth-largest ever, the figures showed. It was also up 56 percent from a year earlier.

"There will definitely be pressure on the currency to rise in value," said Chen Jijun, a Beijing-based economist with Citic Securities.

The United States and other foreign critics argue China's currency, the yuan, is kept artificially low to make Chinese exporters more competitive.

China de-linked the yuan from the US dollar in 2005 and has since allowed it to rise about 10 percent against the greenback, a pace many in the United States consider far too slow.

"We think they need to move considerably more quickly to a point of valuing their currency based on underlying market fundamentals," deputy US Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt told journalists in Brussels on Friday.

Some in the US Congress have called for sanctions to punish China over its currency policies, but Bush administration officials have opted for negotiations and occasional complaints at the World Trade Organisation.

On Thursday, Washington filed its fourth WTO complaint against China, challenging Beijing's restrictions on imports of products of copyright-intensive industries such as films, music and books.

While Chinese exports to the US market rose 15.8 percent in the first nine months, those to the European Union increased at an even faster rate, growing 30.8 percent.

"It is very likely that the... exchange rate will soon become an international economic policy focus," Citigroup economist Huang Yiping said in a research note.

"The rise of the European market is good news for sustaining Chinese export growth, but in the end it might prompt Europe to be more actively engaged in pressing on China's currency."

European steelmakers already are preparing to file a complaint with the European Commission alleging that the nation's steelmakers are exporting at prices below production cost.

The issue was highlighted in Friday's customs data which showed that in the first nine months, steel product exports rose 73.3 percent year-on-year, while imports declined 8.2 percent.

China, which was still the world's biggest importer of steel in 2004, has become the world's biggest exporter three years later and now accounts for 34 percent of the world's steel production.

But with the focus on China's exports, some economists argued more attention ought to be paid to the role played by imports in bringing about the large surplus.

Exports in September rose 22.8 percent year-on-year to 112.5 billion dollars, but imports were up by a more moderate 16.1 percent at 88.6 billion dollars, the customs bureau said.

China's forex reserves, which overtook Japan's for the world's top spot in early 2006, have been boosted not only by trade but also by surging foreign direct investment.

The government late last month launched the China Investment Corp., charged with managing about 200 billion dollars of the nation's massive reserves.

China also said Friday that tax revenues jumped 30.8 percent to 3.72 trillion yuan (500 billion dollars) in the first nine months, the highest rate for that period since 1994.

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