China’s consumer prices stay flat in 2025 amid focus on price wars, domestic demand

China’s consumer prices stayed unchanged from the previous year in 2025 while factory-gate prices fell by 2.6 per cent, suggesting lingering deflationary pressures and underscoring the need for further efforts to boost prices in 2026.

The flat annual reading of the consumer price index (CPI), a major inflation indicator, missed the official 2 per cent growth target for the metric unveiled in March and slowed from the 0.2 per cent increase in 2024, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Friday.

In December, the CPI rose by 0.8 per cent, year on year, the highest monthly increase since March 2023, beating the 0.75 per cent estimated by financial data provider Wind.

“The widening year-on-year increase of CPI in December was mainly driven by the faster rise in food prices,” according to NBS chief statistician Dong Lijuan in a statement on Friday.

Food prices rose 1.1 per cent in December year on year, compared with 0.2 per cent in November.