While the required reserve ratio for financial institutions engaging in deposit business in China edged up by 0.5 percentage points to 10 percent on Sunday, analysts say further hikes are likely.

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Chief economist Qu Hongbin with the HSBC (China) says China's central bank is using reserve ratio hikes to absorb liquidity. "This year we can expect three more reserve ratio hikes," he said.

The People's Bank of China has lifted the deposit reserve ratio five times since last July, with the latest move expected to take 176.5 billion yuan (about 23.22 billion U.S. dollars) out of the banking pool.

In a public statement, the central bank attributed the hikes to increasing currency liquidity which resulted from "unbalanced international payments generated by mounting trade surplus".

Official figures showed the country's outstanding renminbi-dominated loans amounted to 23.1 trillion yuan in January, up 16 percent year-on-year. The growth rate was 0.9 percentage points higher than the end of last year and up 2.2 percentage points from last January.

Meanwhile, China's trade surplus continues to surge, with the January figure climbing 67.3 percent year-on-year to 15.88 billion U.S. dollars.

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