BEIJING (AP) — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has pledged to extend job-creation programs and keep bank-credit flowing as Beijing tries to keep its factories humming and its workers employed at a time of growing trade tensions with the West.

Although the Chinese action is helping to keep the world's economy afloat, the budget plan Wen outlined Friday showed that Beijing is sticking with a course that has driven exports and piled up huge foreign exchange reserves rather than buy up more products made outside China.

Wen made his announcement in the government's annual report to China's legislature, pledging that government spending will grow, albeit at half the rate of last year during the economic downturn, because the basis of the global recovery remains weak. He set a traditional 8 percent economic growth target for what he called a "crucial year'' and warned of continuing economic turbulence from the global financial crisis.

"We still face a very complex situation,'' Wen said in a nationally televised two-hour speech to nearly 3,000 deputies gathered in the Great Hall of the People for the opening of the National People's Congress. "Many destabilizing factors and uncertainties remain in our external environment.''

Wen said China needed to cool inflation, cope with banking risks and boost consumer spending to ease the world's third-largest economy's reliance on exports and investment to drive growth. Much of his address, however, dealt with problems stirring unease among China's 1.3 billion people that could potentially threaten social stability, the communist leadership's overwhelming concern.

Wen pledged to narrow a yawning wealth gap, increase the stock of affordable housing, boost the moribund rural economy and fight rampant corruption.

"Everything we do, we do to ensure that the people live a happier life with more dignity and to make our society fairer and more harmonious,'' Wen said.

Washington is worried about its trade deficit with China, which totaled $226.83 billion in 2009. That's the largest US imbalance with any nation but down 15.4 percent from the record of $268.04 billion set in 2008.

The deficit with China is expected to resume rising in 2010 as the US economy recovers and triggers more orders for Chinese manufacturers of shoes, toys and other low-cost items in high demand by American consumers.

Derek Scissors, a specialist on Asian economies at The Heritage Foundation think tank, said there's no reason for American manufacturers to think that more of their products will be getting into China because of Wen's speech. He said China is still committed to investment in its own companies.so that strong sales to foreign countries continue