Temasek Holdings, the largest overseas investor in Chinese banks, said it has spent more than 8 billion US dollars buying assets in China and plans to add more to capitalise on the nation's growth, Bloomberg reported. Temasek may buy property and other companies that can benefit from China's expanding middle class, Frank Tang, head of Temasek's investments in China, said in an interview. China is at the forefront of Temasek's efforts to boost returns by diversifying its 65 billion US dollars portfolio away from Singapore, where it's the main shareholder in the city's biggest bank, airline and telephone company. Temasek is betting China can reform its state-run banks and manage a soft-landing of its economy, which expanded 11.3 percent in the second quarte, said Bloombergr. Property, pharmaceutical, biofuel and telecommunications companies are among those Temasek may invest in, Tang said. The investment in watch retailer Xinyu Hengdeli, 7.2 percent owned by Swatch Group AG, is a play on expectations that consumers will spend more on personal items. ``This is a classic middle class capturing the consumption story in China,'' said Tang The ``middle class'' population of China, which currently has 1.3 billion people, will reach 650 million by 2020, from 79 million in 2004, according to Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, Asia-Pacific economic adviser at MasterCard International Inc., defining middle-class households as those with an annual income of more than 5,000 US dollars.