BEIJING Militants apparently captured 29 Chinese workers after attacking a remote worksite in a volatile region of Sudan, and Sudanese forces were increasing security for Chinese projects and personnel there, China said Sunday.

China has close political and economic relations with Sudan, especially in the energy sector.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing said the militants attacked Saturday and Sudanese forces launched a rescue mission Sunday in coordination with the Chinese embassy in Khartoum.

The Ministry’s head of consular affairs met with the Sudanese ambassador in Beijing and “urged him to actively conduct rescue missions under the prerequisite of ensuring the safety of the Chinese personnel,” the statement said.

In Khartoum, a Chinese embassy spokesman said the northern branch of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement announced that 29 Chinese workers had been captured in the attack. The spokesman, who asked not be identified, gave no other details and it wasn’t clear if the militants had demanded conditions for their return.

Other details weren’t given. The official Xinhua News Agency cited the state governor as saying the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement attacked a road-building site in South Kordofan and seized the workers.

The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement are a guerrilla force that has fought against Sudan’s regime. Its members hail from a minority ethnic group now in control of much of South Sudan, which became the world’s newest country only six months ago in a breakaway from Sudan.

Sudan has accused South Sudan of arming pro-South Sudan groups in South Kordofan. The government of South Sudan has called such accusations a smoke screen intended to justify a future invasion of the South.

China has sent large numbers of workers to potentially unstable regions such as Sudan and last year was forced to send ships and planes to help with the emergency evacuation of 30,000 of its citizens from the fighting in Libya.

China has consistently used its clout in diplomatic forums such as the United Nations to defend Sudan and its longtime leader Omar al-Bashir. In recent years, it has also sought to build good relations with leaders from the south,wholesale True Religion T-shirts, where most of Sudan’s oil is located.

Chinese companies have also invested heavily in Sudanese oil production, along with companies India and elsewhere.

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Associated Press writer Mohamed Saeed contributed to this report from Khartoum.

Liu pledged to strictly control risks from lending to local governments and from non-bank lending a crucial but now strained source of financing for private industry.

SHANGHAI China’s top banking regulator says the country’s lenders have risks under control, despite concerns that massive local debts and ripple effects from failed informal lending schemes threaten the country’s financial stability.

In some cases, the companies are going unpaid by customers embroiled in debt problems of their own, and sometimes they have used the money borrowed to invest not in manufacturing but in speculative investments of their own.

“It is undeniable that local government financing platforms have not been prudently managed. A lack of monitoring mechanisms and other problems have created a number of risks,” he said.

China’s commercial banks have an average capital adequacy ratio of more than 12 percent and ample provisions to cover any loans gone sour, Liu said in outlining the sector’s relative strengths.

UBS economist Tao Wang puts informal lending at between 2 trillion and 4 trillion yuan ($314 billion-$628 billion), or up to 10 percent of China’s GDP.

At the same time, Liu acknowledged concern over the estimated 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.7 trillion) in debts or about 27 percent of GDP owed by local governments that have borrowed heavily to help support stimulus-related construction projects.

But an unknown amount of bank loans have gone into private lending, where pyramids of high-interest loans are collapsing as mostly smaller and medium-size private companies defaulted on debts.

China’s mostly state-run banks have curbed lending as regulators have tightened monetary policy while requiring them to keep record levels of reserves to help cool inflation.

“Risk exposure has been effectively curbed,” he said.

Liu said that real estate-related lending accounts for 10.4 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) of total loans, well below levels in other countries, and that stress tests had found that the banks were in “general control of real estate risks.”

Some analysts have expressed concern over what they say is a significant amount of “off-balance sheet” lending, however, that may eventually pose a greater threat in the longer term.

The government has intervened, ordering banks to relax repayment terms and loosen credit for small and medium-size enterprises,

He also noted that China’s total public sector debt remains at 50 percent, below the conventional warning level of 60 percent and well below levels in the U.S. and Europe.

He promised strict control of local government borrowing and use of loan guarantees and an improvement to transparency in government budgets.

In remarks to a conference Wednesday in Beijing, Liu accused analysts and rating agencies for “bad-mouthing” China’s banks and economy, saying they were underestimating China’s capacity for reform and management.

She says China’s massive state-run banks would face little impact from some of those loans turning bad. A bigger risk is Wenzhou’s credit squeeze spreading to other parts of the world’s No. 2 economy.

But he added that the government and banking regulators had the foresight to take effective action, saying that “overall risks are controllable.”

Ultimately, the government is responsible for such loans, Liu said. But he noted that local governments also have significant assets that can be used to help repay debts.

“We are generally concerned about local government financing loans, real estate loans, shadow banking and other areas of potential risk,” Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, said in remarks released Thursday on the CBRC’s website.