The Bush administration on Sunday promoted a sweeping plan to overhaul China's financial markets and open the country to foreign banks, investment firms and insurance companies.

Chinese officials offered virtually no public reaction on the U.S. agenda. In a brief news conference at the end of a meeting of finance ministers from 20 nations, Finance Minister Jin Renqing took a handful of innocuous questions from Chinese reporters and then called an end to the proceedings.

In a communiqué in which all the countries laid out their goals, China declared that "the socialist market economy has primarily taken shape." It made no reference to a flexible exchange rate and declared that state-owned companies were a "mainstay" of the economy.

In private meetings between top American and Chinese officials, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, warned Chinese leaders on Sunday that their economy needed flexibility to withstand future shocks from outside. He said that China's economic expansion had occurred during an unusually "benign" period of global growth but that it could not assume that the such a period would continue.

The U.S. Treasury secretary, John Snow, said the Chinese "are concerned about moving too fast."

"They are worried about stepping into the unknown," he said.

U.S. officials said the plan was part of an effort to put the yuan into a broader debate over China's lopsided reliance on exports as the main source of economic growth.

The plan, to be discussed in two days of talks here and in Beijing, calls for China to speed the privatization of state-owned companies, including banks; to develop a Chicago-style futures market for currency trading; to establish an independent credit rating agency; and to crack down on bailouts for banks left holding bad loans.

"What we tried to do is take a quantum leap in sophistication and scope," said Timothy Adams, under secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department. "It gives you a picture of the truly complex nature of what we are trying to do."

Though many of the ideas are familiar, and often supported by Chinese leaders in principle, the list reflects an increased effort to lecture China about internal financial issues. But this strategy could backfire, because Chinese leaders invariably bristle at pressure from American officials, and they could view the new American "priorities" as an unwelcome intrusion.

The new tack comes as Snow continues to show little progress in the volatile economic dispute with China over exchange rates. Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress have long complained that the yuan has been pegged at an artificially low value against the dollar, making Chinese exports to the United States cheaper than they would otherwise be.

China announced about a 2 percent revaluation in July but has yet to follow up with any additional changes. Based on signals from senior Chinese officials on Friday and Saturday, Snow seems unlikely to return to Washington next week with any evidence of new progress.

He has been arguing that China needs to get people to spend more and save less. Bush administration officials have said a financial overhaul would help make that happen. Many economists agree with that assessment, but they caution that there are limits to what the United States can do to speed change.

"They are doing a smart thing, because the exchange rate is a small part of the overall economic relationship," said Andrew Rothman, a strategist in Shanghai with CLSA Asia-Pacific, a brokerage firm. But he added, "This is not the kind of thing where someone flips a switch and it happens overnight."

Rothman said that China had already embraced many of Snow's ideas and that consumer spending had grown sharply in the past few years. Retail sales in China have been climbing about 10 percent a year for the past several years, he said. Household credit, virtually nonexistent five years ago, now accounts for 16 percent of all outstanding credit.

But many of the Bush administration's proposals would encounter fierce political opposition from many quarters. China's state-owned banks and far-flung rural credit cooperatives, for example, have many defenders in the Communist Party, and they are certain to oppose well-financed competition from Western banks.