WASHINGTON - China has emerged successfully from the global financial crisis, but the nation must continue to undertake fundamental reforms to sustain its economic growth and help the rest of the world recover, Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, said on Wednesday.

As the rest of the world suffered its sharpest decline in six decades, China acted aggressively in the face of a global financial crisis and slowdown, and its economic expansion only ticked down slightly to 9.2 percent in 2009, Lardy said at a book launch event hosted by the think tank Wednesday.

Despite the impressive economic performance, China must adopt a "fundamentally new growth model if it is to sustain anywhere near its recent pace of economic growth" and cope with various economic imbalances, Lardy argued in his new book entitled "Sustaining China's Economic Growth After the Global Financial Crisis".

Those imbalances included a low share of private consumption expenditure, an elevated share of investment in gross domestic product (GDP), an outsized manufacturing sector and a diminutive service sector.