China plans to import more rice from Japan, Li Changjiang, director of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, said yesterday.

Li, a delegate to the Party congress in Beijing, said preparations for further imports from Japan are going "very smoothly."

Twenty-four tons of rice from Japan hit the shelves in department stores in Shanghai and Beijing in July and has sold out, although its price was about 20 times the price of rice produced in China.

An import ban on Japanese rice was imposed in 2003 after China found insects in rice imports from Japan.

An agreement to lift the ban was reached between the two countries in April this year.