BEIJING -- China's Internet start-ups are primed to keep growing, nourished by plentiful capital and a huge pool of engineering talent, leaders of top U.S. Web companies said Tuesday.

Top China executives from Google and Microsoft Corp. said Chinese Internet companies were undergoing the sort of development enjoyed by their U.S. rivals in the 1990s.

"For many Chinese young people and young students, they have a very strong desire for innovation, for being successful, for starting their own businesses," Kai-Fu Lee, vice president of Google Inc. and president of Google Greater China, told participants in an industry conference in Beijing.

While warning of a get-rich-quick mentality among some in the Chinese industry, Lee and others said strong investor interest and an educational system that produces about 300,000 new information technology graduates every year _ around five times that in the U.S. and twice that of India _ laid the groundwork for years of continued steady growth.

"So the nation has such a huge talent potential," Lee said. "I think there will undoubtedly be innovation in China."

Pony Ma, whose QQ system dominates the Chinese market for instant messaging, said China's Internet and mobile information industries were just getting off the ground, leaving plenty of room for growth in the more traditional Web fields.

"Generally speaking, it has been developing in a very healthy way. In the past one or two years, it was sort of crazy ... but now it has become much better," Ma said.