The move came hours after a central bank official speaking in the capital Beijing said that the PBOC was in no hurry to cut the benchmark deposit rate, the rate that determines how much hundreds of millions Chinese deposit holders can get from their banks.

Liu Guoqiang, a deputy governor at the PBOC, said such a move may hurt the “feelings” of deposit holders, underlining the bank’s reluctance to join other central monetary authorities – such as the US Federal Reserve – in slashing interest rates.

Liu said it was too early to calculate the global economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak.

“The impact will be very great, but how big it will be in the end, or when things will get better … this is still full of uncertainty,” he said. “That’s all I can say as I am not sure there is a clearer answer.”

The comments offer fresh evidence that Beijing is not set on implementing aggressive monetary easing, even though the country is in danger of reporting an economic contraction in the first quarter of 2020 for the first time since 1976.

The current fallout from the outbreak is not yet as bad as the 2008 global financial crisis, Liu said.

“A 50 per cent fall in stock prices is the standard for a crisis, and the drop this time was about 25 per cent since late February,” he said, adding he was uncertain there would be another fall of 25 per cent.

China’s economic data for the first quarter, which will be released in two weeks, will “not look good”, the central bank official said.

The coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1 million people across the world, will cause a global recession in 2020 that will be at least as bad as – if not worse than – the global financial crisis, Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, said last week.

The government is trying to put a brave face despite the gloomy outlook. President Xi Jinping has said repeatedly that China would aim to achieve its economic and social goals this year, without elaborating.

If China sticks to its original target of doubling GDP in 2020 from 2010, it has to achieve growth of at least 5.6 per cent this year, which would require significant monetary easing and aggressive fiscal spending.

Pressure is growing on China’s central bank to do more as economic downturn grows more serious.

Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura Bank, wrote in a recent note that China “has been behind the curve” in rolling out supportive measures to its enterprises and households.