The Chinese central bank effectively borrowed the money from the Chinese public to buy the dollars, euros and other currencies in both funds. The central bank has required commercial banks to transfer one-fifth of their domestic deposits to it and has used that money to buy $1 billion or more a day of foreign currencies to slow the appreciation of the renminbi against the dollar.

The central bank has also pressed commercial banks to buy central bank bills that pay very low rates of interest and has used the proceeds to buy dollars. These methods of financing foreign exchange reserves have left the central bank with significant domestic liabilities in renminbi to balance against whatever return it can earn on foreign bonds, making economic policy makers particularly wary of taking risks with foreign exchange reserves.

The possibility that China might buy large amounts of European Union bonds has been raised repeatedly in the last year and a half by various officials from Greece, Italy and the European Union. These officials have sought to reassure financial markets that there will be demand for European government bonds, as a way to encourage investors to continue buying those bonds and thereby hold down the interest rates that European governments pay on their debt.

The Chinese government has mostly discouraged this speculation. But Prime Minister Wen Jiabao raised hopes in Europe in mid-September when he said that China might be prepared to lend a hand if Europe were to label China a “market economy,” a designation that would make it difficult for European companies to file antidumping cases against low-priced Chinese exports.

Mr. Wen did not offer details on how China might help. Ms. Fu’s remarks represented some of the strongest comments by a Chinese official since then to suggest that Beijing was in no hurry to lend a hand.

In remarks at a conference held at the Foreign Ministry on Friday and then reported by the state media over the weekend, Ms. Fu did not explicitly rule out buying bonds that might be issued as part of a European bailout. She did say that China continued to consider Europe an important economic partner.

But her caution suggested that China was not eager to increase its already sizable investment in the region; the foreign reserves include an estimated $1 trillion in euro-denominated assets, and experts on the Chinese central bank believe that much of it is invested in German government bonds.