The 30-year-old man surnamed Bao was hospitalised with a fever after arriving in Sichuan province in southwestern China on a flight from the United States via Tokyo and Beijing on Saturday, the Ministry of Health said.

"Sichuan province has confirmed a case of the A(H1N1) flu virus. This is our country's first case of A(H1N1)," spokesman Mao Qunan said in a statement posted on the ministry's website, using the virus's official name.

China had previously confirmed a case, a Mexican national, in the semi-autonomous southern city of Hong Kong.

Officials said Bao, whose full name was not given, was in a stable condition at a hospital in the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

Bao had travelled to Beijing on Northwest Airlines flight NW029 from Tokyo before connecting on a domestic flight to Chengdu, the ministry said.

China, which has come under foreign criticism for its tough swine-flu quarantine measures, launched a search for Bao's fellow passengers from both flights, state media said.

About 120 of the Tokyo-Beijing passengers had been found, Xinhua news agency said, quoting Beijing's emergency response office.

There were 233 passengers on the flight, 106 of them foreigners, the health ministry said.

Health officials had contacted many passengers and were "persuading them to take quarantine measures," Xinhua reported.

About 84 of the 150 passengers who travelled on the same Sichuan Airlines flight from Beijing to Chengdu had been found and put under quarantine with no apparent symptoms, China Central Television said.

All passengers on the flight were Chinese nationals, the government said.

In a reflection of the official urgency of the search, China Mobile, the country's biggest cell phone operator, sent a text message to clients urging passengers to report to authorities.

Chinese officials said the case highlighted the need for stringent measures.

"We cannot relax for a single moment, for a single flight or for a single passenger," Cui Baoxiang, deputy head of the Beijing authority handling health checks at the city's airport, told reporters.

Those who came into close contact with Bao during his medical examination, as well as his father, girlfriend and a taxi driver, had also been placed under observation, Xinhua said.

And a meeting presided by China's Premier Wen Jiabao highlighted Monday that authorities could not relax their vigilance.

"Due to frequent international exchanges, there is a lot of contact between China and other countries, particularly with people from seriously affected areas," China's state television quoted the meeting as saying.

"The danger of the epidemic entering is always there, and one cannot relax vigilance or take this lightly."

Asia's first case of swine flu was reported in Hong Kong on May 1, a Mexican national who flew into the city from Mexico via Shanghai.

The case led to scores of people being placed in quarantine in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, including the Mexican's fellow airline passengers and almost 300 guests and staff at his Hong Kong hotel.

Mexico, the epicentre of the virus outbreak, accused China of discriminating against its citizens by quarantining Mexicans even when they came to China from other countries and showed no signs of the virus.

China has denied targeting any country and said the measures were necessary to avoid "catastrophic consequences" in such a densely populated country.

A total of 4,694 confirmed cases have been reported in 30 countries, with 53 people killed by the virus, 48 of which have been in Mexico, the World Health Organisation said on its website.

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