China's August CPI rises 3.5%

China's consumer price index (CPI), a major gauge to measure inflation, rose by a 22-month high of 3.5 percent in August from one year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Saturday.

The growth rate was 0.2 percentage points higher compared with that in July, the NBS said.

On a month-on-month basis, China's CPI grew 0.6 percent in August from July, NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said.

Food prices, which account for about one third of the weighting in calculating the CPI, climbed 7.5 percent year-on-year in August, according to NBS statistics. The pace of growth accelerated from the 6.8-percent rise in July and 5.7-percent growth in June.

The country's CPI increased 2.8 percent year-on-year in the first eight months of the year, accelerating from 2.7-percent increase in the January-July period. The Chinese government in March set a target of keeping the full-year inflation rate at around 3 percent this year.

The producer price index, a major measure of inflation at the wholesale level, rose 4.3 percent in August from a year earlier, slower from July's 4.8-percent growth, Sheng said.