China's crude oil imports jumped 34 percent in June from a year earlier due to surg-ing domestic energy demand in the world's fastest-growing economy, figures from the General Administration of Customs showed Thursday.

Crude imports climbed to 22.27 million metric tons, or 5.44 million barrels a day, beating the previous record of 20.98 million tons in April. Natural gas imports reached 224,185 tons, a rise of 58 percent year-on-year.

"It's a normal increase in June for crude oil imports," said Lin Boqiang, director of the Center for Energy Economic Research of China in Xiamen University, east China's Fujian Province.

"Given that imports in June 2009 dropped heavily due to the financial crisis," said Lin.

Other experts attributed the increase to China's oil reserve strategy.

China started the second phase of developing storage tanks for crude reserves last year.

The tanks built in the first phase hold the equivalent of about 16.4 million cubic meters of oil, or about 30 days of net imports, the nation's top energy administration said last June.

"The country's overall crude oil imports for this year, except for the oil reserve strategy, will be a little bit down to just over 10 percent,'' said Liu Gu, an analyst with Guotai Junan Securities in Shenzhen.

China's economic growth slowed to 10.3 percent in the second quarter from 11.9 per-cent in the first quarter, data from China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.

In June, Chinese refiners processed a total of 35.35 million tons of crude oil, according to data released by the NBS. In the first half, Chinese imports of refined products totaled 19.86 million tons, a decline of nearly 10 percent from a year ago. China's crude imports in the first semester of 2010 were up 30 percent from a year ago.