China responded to the COVID-19 pandemic impressively, once again handling well a major crisis, said CNBC on Tuesday, citing an International Monetary Fund official.

China's aggressive stance in containing the virus enabled it to better control new cases, with the measures including travel restrictions, strict lockdowns and a fast rollout of health facilities, CNBC said.

The kind of measures in the country has really helped in this circumstance, said Tobias Adrian, director of the IMF's monetary and capital markets department, to CNBC.

After drawing a comparison with the global financial crisis of 2008, Adrian said that China has fared very well again at the second time with a major crisis.

"They have cracked down on the pandemic very aggressively, very early and the economy really already came back to normal levels at the middle of last year, so way ahead of any country in the world," CNBC quoted Adrian as saying.

Last year, China achieved 2.3 percent GDP year-on-year growth becoming the only major economy to register positive growth despite the global economic recession triggered by the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to IMF's latest forecast that the country's economy will grow at 8.4 percent in 2021 which is 0.3 percentage point stronger than in its January forecast, and the global economy growth will be 6 percent this year.