Prime Minister Wen Jiabao

Washington ? The Chinese prime minister’s blunt warning on Friday that he fears that his nation’s investments in U.S. financial assets may be endangered signals both a need to distract attention from troubles at home and how interrelated the two giant economies have become, analysts said.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao got the attention of Wall Street and Washington when he said during a news conference that his nation had “lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets. To be honest, I am definitely a little worried.”

China holds more than $1 trillion in U.S. government debt. Much of its vast foreign currency reserves are in U.S. dollars. If the dollar collapsed or U.S. inflation spiked, the value of those assets could decline sharply. Those scenarios seem highly unlikely but aren’t impossible.

The White House fired back at Wen, with spokesman Robert Gibbs noting in his daily briefing that the Obama administration’s aggressive actions to right the listing economy help both nations.

“I think the best thing we can do to assure anybody in Washington, America or throughout the world that we’re serious is to pass the president’s budget and put ourselves back on the path towards fiscal sustainability and fiscal responsibility,” Gibbs said. He added that there’s “no safer investment in the world than in the United States.”

Wen’s comments were surprising because the Obama administration has repeatedly praised China for also undertaking a big fiscal stimulus program to spark economic activity amid a downturn.

Why the sudden tough talk from China? Experts suggested that Chinese leaders are feeling the heat at home as the nation’s blistering economic growth rate has slowed sharply because of the global downturn.

“They want to keep alive the idea that this problem is a foreign problem, thrust upon them,” said Albert Keidel, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a longtime former China hand at the Treasury Department.

The global economic crisis has caused rising unemployment in China, a nation that’s become accustomed to the double-digit economic growth of recent years. Even before the slowdown, the Chinese government, which isn’t democratically elected, confronted tens of thousands of annual incidents of civil unrest.

“I think they are very sensitive to domestic consumption of the idea that the government is not doing the job in terms of solving the problems of unemployment,” Keidel said.

Wen’s comments may also reflect concerns that the Obama administration has failed to present a credible fix for U.S. banks.