A customer buys vegetables at a supermarket in Zaozhuang, east China's Shandong province, Aug 9, 2021. (PHOTO / XINHUA)

BEIJING – China's consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, rose 2.3 percent year-on-year in November, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed Thursday.

The figure was higher than the 1.5 percent year-on-year growth recorded in October.

Food prices rebounded to climb 1.6 percent. The price of pork, a staple meat in China, saw contraction narrow to 32.7 percent, while the price of fresh vegetables hiked 30.6 percent last month, said senior NBS statistician Dong Lijuan

Specifically, food prices rebounded to climb 1.6 percent. The price of pork, a staple meat in China, saw contraction narrow to 32.7 percent, while the price of fresh vegetables hiked 30.6 percent last month, said senior NBS statistician Dong Lijuan.

Non-food prices rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier, up from an increase of 2.4 percent in October, said Dong.

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China has set its consumer inflation target at approximately 3 percent for the year 2021, according to this year's government work report.

PPI up 12.9 percent

Meanwhile, the factory gate prices saw a slower expansion in November due to greater efforts to implement policies to ensure supply and stabilize prices of energy and raw materials, the official data showed.

The producer price index, which measures costs for goods at the factory gate, went up 12.9 percent year-on-year in November, said the NBS.

The figure shrunk from the 13.5 percent year-on-year increase registered in October.

Specifically, the growth momentum in prices of production materials was slowing down last month, as the year-on-year growth rate dipped 0.9 percentage points from October to 17 percent, said Dong.

Measures adopted by multiple departments to contain coal prices helped propel both the coal output and market supply to further grow, the senior NBS statistician said, adding that prices for coal mining and washing industry reversed the upward trend with a 4.9 percent month-on-month decline in November.

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Against the backdrop of high prices of international crude oil and natural gas, the domestic oil-related industries saw rising prices with the PPI for the oil exploitation sector up 7.1 percent from a month ago, Dong said, adding that among the 40 surveyed industrial sectors, 37 reported year-on-year price rises.