BEIJING - China's consumer price index (CPI) jumped by 6.9 percent in November on food price increases, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.
It is the biggest monthly rise this year, indicating accelerating inflation pressure.
Yao Jingyuan, chief economist with the NBS, said price hikes for foodstuffs, which have a weight of 33 percent in China's CPI, and oil price rises were major driving forces behind the rise.
Food prices ballooned by 18.2 percent in November, compared with 17.6 percent in October when the CPI repeated a 33-month high of 6.5 percent scored in August.
The accumulative increase of the main gauge of inflation reached 4.6 percent in the first 11 months, said the bureau.
The country's top statistician Xie Fuzhan said earlier China's consumer price index will rise 4.5 percent to 4.6 percent for the whole of the year, which would be a yearly new high since 1997.