BEIJING - The G20 should give top priority to maintaining economic growth, said Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday prior to attending the G20 summit in Cannes slated for November 3-4.

Hu made the remarks in a written interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro.

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Hu said the international community should look at the connections between robust growth, sustained growth and balanced growth objectively.

"To achieve sustainable growth is the long-term goal, and to realize balanced growth through economic structure adjustment is an objective demand. Meanwhile, it is a primary task in the present stage to achieve robust world economic growth, which is also a premise of ensuring balanced and sustainable growth," said the Chinese president.

He urged the international community to correctly recognize the causes of imbalances in the global economy.

"Imbalances are external performances rather than the fundamental reason for deeper problems of the world economy," he said.

Hu said the root cause of world economic imbalances is structural, including the imbalances in the world economic structure, international division of labor and international monetary system.

"In order to address world economic imbalances, countries around the world should make joint efforts to adjust their economic structure," he said, adding it is a long-term process which cannot be accomplished overnight.

During the previous G20 summits, leaders of China and other countries had noted that the largest imbalance in the world economy was the yawning development gap between the North and South, Hu said.

"Only by helping developing countries speed up development, share prosperity, can we further expand global demand and achieve sustained growth of the world economy," he said.

This is the reason China firmly supports the G20 to focus on global development issues, he added.

Hu said since the global financial crisis, China has introduced positive measures to stimulate domestic demand, and maintained annual GDP growth averaging over 9 percent.

In the first three quarters, the country's GDP grew 9.4 percent and retail sales expanded 17.7 percent from a year earlier. China's imports reached nearly 1.29 trillion US dollars, up 26.7 percent, according to Hu.

"All this growth has greatly contributed to the world economic recovery and growth," he said.

Currently China is making efforts to speed up changes in the economic development mode and adjust the economic structure, establish a long-term mechanism to expand domestic demand, and to foster a new pattern of economic growth driven by consumption, investment and exports, Hu said.

China's trade surplus of GDP has fallen from 7.5 percent in 2007 to 3.2 percent in 2010, he added.

In the following five years, China's consumption growth rate will remain at a high level, with imports expected to exceed 8 trillion US dollars.

"This will be the contribution of China's economic growth to the world economy," said the Chinese president.