The bank, in which Bank of America owns a 10 percent stake, earned 92.8 billion yuan ($14.5 billion) in the six months to the end of June, compared with 70.7 billion yuan a year earlier, the company said in a statement filed to the Shanghai Stock Exchange late Sunday.

Net interest income, which accounts for more than 70 percent of its profit, grew 23.7 percent year-on-year in the first half to 145.7 billion yuan after the government hiked benchmark interest rates a number of times this year.

Fee and commission income also surged 41.7 percent from the same period last year to 47.7 billion yuan.

"The group was actively engaged in service and product innovation which boosted the growth in the fee-based businesses. As a result, net fee and commission income rose substantially," the bank said.

Shanghai-listed shares in China Construction Bank closed down 0.89 percent at 4.45 yuan in a weak market.

Lending growth of Chinese banks has slowed since China introduced a slew of measures to rein in liquidity to fight inflation, which hit the highest level in three years at 6.5 percent in July.

The central bank raised its benchmark interest rates twice in the first half of the year and the amount of money banks must keep in reserves with the central bank six times.

China Construction Bank said its outstanding loans stood at 5.99 trillion yuan as of the end of June, up 8.3 percent from the end of December. That growth was slower than the 11.1 percent recorded in the first half of 2010.

But net interest margin, a gauge of lending profitability, widened to 2.66 percent at the end of June from 2.41 percent the same time a year ago on the interest rates hikes, the bank said, offsetting the negative impact of slower growth in new loans.

The bank's non-performing loan ratio stood at 1.03 percent at the end of June, lower than 1.14 percent at the end of December.

Obama's approval rating on the struggling economy has dipped to 26 percent in a Gallup poll as fears grow of a slump into a second recession and global stock markets plunge, clouding his 2012 reelection prospects.

"You've got an unemployment rate that is still too high, an economy that's not growing fast enough," Obama said in an interview with CBS News taped during his economic-themed bus tour of three states last week.

"For me to argue, 'look, we've actually made the right decisions, things would have been much worse had we not made those decisions,' that's not that satisfying if you don't have a job right now," he said.

"And I understand that and I expect to be judged a year from now on whether or not things have continued to get better."

The president dismissed fears of a second recession which have spooked the markets but argued that outside factors like the European debt crisis, Japan's tsunami and the Arab spring had hit economic growth.

"I don't think we're in danger of another recession, but we are in danger of not having a recovery that's fast enough to deal with what is a genuine unemployment crisis for a whole lot of folks out there -- and that's why we need to be doing more," he said.

Obama has accused Republicans of blocking his plans to create jobs and revive the economic recovery, and of putting their own political gain ahead of their nation's needs.

Currently on vacation on Martha's Vineyard, a well-heeled resort island off Massachusetts, Obama has promised to unveil a major jobs and deficit-cutting program in September, when lawmakers return to Washington.

He wants Republican lawmakers to pass an extension to a payroll tax cut, to agree to the creation of an infrastructure bank to put construction workers back on the job and to agree jobs help for Iraq and Afghan war veterans.

While the president took his family to a beach, some of his longest serving aides, now out of the White House and involved with his reelection bid, fanned out on Sunday morning talk shows to push the program.

"I think people are tired of the games in Washington. The only thing that keeps us from acting on many of these things is pure politics," said longtime Obama aide David Axelrod on CNN's "State of the Union."

"The fact that we can't agree to extend a payroll tax cut for working Americans is bewildering to me.'

But another former big beast of the Washington jungle, ex-George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, laid into Obama's record on the economy and dismissed his promise for a big new jobs plan.

"His policies have utterly failed. This is the seventh or eighth or ninth time that we've heard the president talked about producing a plan," Rove said on "Fox News Sunday."

"And each time that he sort of (got) around (to) tossing an idea on the table, it has included only more spending, more deficit, more debt, and the American people are fed up with it."

But another former Obama aide Bill Burton snapped back, saying Americans did not want lectures from an administration that "turned a record surplus into a deficit, that got us involved in a war that we never should have been in, and turned the floor of the New York Stock Exchange into a casino."