China will continue to put stabilizing consumer prices and managing inflation expectation as the top priority for macro regulation, the People's Bank of China (PBOC), the central bank, said Tuesday.

The central bank pledged to properly handle the relationship between controlling money supplies and improving structures, and to remove inflation's monetary conditions while meeting various financing demands.

The central bank said that it will continue to strengthen liquidity management and make good use of various price and quantitative tools, such as open market operations, bank reserve requirement ratios and interest rates based upon market developments.

The nation's consumer price index (CPI) rose 5 percent in the first quarter of this year, with the March CPI reaching 5.4 percent. This makes for the fastest CPI gains in more than two years.

Experts and officials have expected the country's first-half CPI would exceed 5 percent and that the second-quarter figure would be even higher due to carryover effects.

Faced with rising inflationary pressures, China has raised benchmark interest rates four times since October and banks' reserve ratio 10 times since the beginning of last year. The official bank reserve ratio stands at 20.5 percent for most commercial lenders in China.

China may hike reserve requirement ratio for banks again in May as foreign exchange inflows remain heavy recently, the state-run China Securities Journal reported Wednesday, citing an unnamed industry source.