BEIJING, China (Reuters) -- China will push forward steadily with reform of the yuan, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan said on Tuesday, a day after Premier Wen Jiabao insisted Beijing would not bow to foreign pressure for a rise in the currency.

Zeng also vowed to speed up reform of China's state-owned enterprises and financial institutions.

Market-orientated changes to China's system of setting interest rates were also on the agenda, he said in a speech to the Fortune Global Forum in Beijing on Monday.

"We will steadily push forward reform of the renminbi exchange rate formation mechanism," Zeng said.

The yuan, also known as the renminbi, has been pegged near 8.28 per U.S. dollar since the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis.

But China's big balance-of-payments surplus, and in particular its growing trade surplus with the United States, is increasing pressure on Beijing to loosen the peg and let the currency rise.

Washington blames what it sees as an unfairly cheap yuan for a surge in Chinese textile imports since a decades-old system of quotas on developing countries' clothing exports was scrapped on January 1.

The Bush administration said last week it would reimpose curbs on imports of Chinese trousers, shirts and underwear, a move denounced by Beijing as flouting world trade rules.

Wen told Washington on Monday not to politicize the textiles dispute, saying that doing so could throw up obstacles to China's long-standing plan to let the yuan trade more freely.

"Reform of the renminbi's exchange rate is a matter of China's own sovereignty," Xinhua quoted Wen as saying.

"Any pressure or media play-up, or politicizing an economic matter, will not help solve problems," he told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation.

Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Liao Xiaoqi summoned David Sedney, the deputy head of the U.S. embassy in China, to express China's "strong displeasure and firm opposition" to the United States' curbs on Chinese clothing sales, the People's Daily newspaper reported on Tuesday.