SHANGHAI -- Newly anointed Chinese Communist Party boss Hu Jintao and his eight new colleagues on the all-powerful politburo standing committee are inheriting an economy humming at annual growth rates of nearly eight percent.

But even as China seems to have skirted the recessions currently crippling most of the world's economies, its heady growth masks a series of problems that could quickly see things grind to a halt, analysts say.

Longtime heir in waiting Hu and eight others, including current vice premiers Wu Bangguo and Wen Jiabao, were named to the new nine-man politburo standing committee unveiled in Beijing Friday, after the end of the party's 16th National Congress the previous day, AFP reported.

China's new leaders face a host of difficulties -- ranging from rural and industrial joblessness to massively insolvent banks and a largely bankrupt state enterprise sector -- that outgoing "economics czar" Premier Zhu Rongji has failed to tackle with any great success.

"Agriculture, laid off workers, state-enterprises -- all these problems are connected with each other," said Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Professor Jiang Hong.

Crucial to the Hu-led team's success will be the maintenance of China's strong economic growth rates while keeping a lid on these major structural problems, experts say.

"The most important thing is to maintain the current seven to eight percent economic annual growth rate, because currently there are a lot problems," said Jiang.

Beijing had set an official growth target of seven percent for the year, a figure it has been long assumed Asia's second-biggest economy would easily exceed. However, the achievement is deeply undercut by China's banking debt, experts say.

By Western accounting standards, China's four main commercial banks are effectively insolvent thanks to decades of handing out easy loans to government-owned companies.

The banks have been trying to overhaul their books by auctioning off non-performing loans at steep discounts, but real change has been slowed by the fear of the political repercussions in forcing defaulting state corporations out of business.

Official statistics show that China's banks have sold non-performing loans worth 230 billion yuan ($27 billion), only a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars-worth of bad loans thought to be hidden in Byzantine trading books.

Zeng Peiyan, head of the State Development Planning Commission, recently said economic policies would remain the same in coming years, strongly hinting that Hu and his team are unlikely to change the slow-and-steady reform pace followed thus far.

Zeng incidentally won a promotion into the 25-member politburo of the Communist Party on Friday.