China's premier says market confidence in yuan has significantly improved

BEIJING (Reuters) - Market confidence in China's yuan currency has improved significantly, Premier Li Keqiang said on Tuesday, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.

The yuan has stabilised this year, due to curbs on capital outflows and a reversal of a rally in the dollar, following a fall of 6.5 percent in 2016 - the Chinese currency's biggest annual drop since 1994.

"China's foreign trade grew sharply in the first quarter of this year," Xinhua quoted Li as saying in a post on Weibo, the country's equivalent of social network Twitter.

"A very important reason is that market confidence in the renminbi (yuan) has significantly strengthened."

The outside world has stable expectations for the currency's exchange rate, he added.

Li also reiterated that China would keep the yuan basically stable at a reasonable, balanced level, Xinhua said.

China's 2017 export outlook brightened considerably as it reported forecast-beating trade growth in March and as U.S. President Donald Trump softened his anti-China rhetoric in an abrupt policy shift.

(Reporting by China monitoring desk and Kevin Yao; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)