China has said its annual inflation rate rose in July to its highest level in more than three years, as the government struggles to rein in soaring food costs.
The country's consumer price index rose 6.5% compared with a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said. This was the highest level since June 2008 when it reached 7.1%.
Separate figures show that industrial output from China's millions of factories and workshops rose at an annual rate of 14% in July. This was slower than expected by economists.
Fixed asset investment, a measure of government spending on infrastructure, rose 25.4% in the first seven months of the year, the government also said.
The July figure is likely to fuel concern among policymakers anxious about inflation's potential to trigger social unrest, and about instability in the Chinese economy at a time of renewed global financial peril.
China has been struggling to tame inflation despite restricting the amount of money banks can lend on numerous occasions and hiking interest rates five times since October.
Food prices, which the bureau has said are likely to hurt low earners the hardest, rose at annual rate of 14.8% in July. But analysts said inflation was now close to a peak and forecast it would fall back later in the year as Beijing's efforts to curb prices kicked in. They pointed out that prices rose by only 0.5% compared with June.
Some analysts are concerned that China might go too far in tightening monetary policy and trigger a sharp slowdown in the world's second-largest economy - which could have dire consequences for the world.
