Inflation in China raced to an 11-year high last month and showed signs of spreading beyond food into the wider economy. The consumer price index, the main gauge of inflation, rose 6.9 per cent compared with a year earlier. The National Bureau of Statistics said that the jump had been fuelled by an 18.2 per cent rise in food prices.

The price of pork, the staple meat in the Chinese diet, soared by 56 per cent. Its price has been rising steadily this year, driven by an outbreak of blue ear disease among pigs and by rising feed prices. Yet economists were more concerned by the 1.4 per cent jump in non-food consumer prices — up from a 1.1 per cent rise in October and the sharpest rise this year.

Housing costs rose 6 per cent from a year earlier and from 4.8 per cent in October. Economists attributed this to increases in prices for petrol and liquefied petroleum gas, which pushed up utility prices, and said that this could be the main contributor to consumer price inflation next year. Yao Jingyuan, chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that full-year consumer price inflation was likely to register a rise of about 4.7 per cent, its highest since 1996.

Huang Yiping, an economist at Citigroup, said: “The inflation issue has evolved into more of a macroeconomic problem.”

China’s leaders said last week that they would shift to a “tight” monetary policy from a decade-long “prudent” stance and cited stubbornly high consumer price inflation as an important element in the shift. Several economists said that it was increasingly likely that the People’s Bank of China would raise interest rates for the sixth time before the end of the year.

On Saturday, the central bank raised the proportion of deposits that banks must hold in reserve by a full percentage point to 14.5 per cent as part of its drive to tame credit growth and tame inflation. It was the tenth reserve requirement increase this year, but the first to exceed a half-point rise.

Hong Liang, an economist at Goldman Sachs, said: “We expect the central bank to respond to the strong inflation data with additional tightening measures.”

In a sign that Beijing may not be deaf to complaints from America that it is holding the yuan to an unfairly low value, effectively subsidising exports, China set the currency at a new high against the dollar yesterday. The yuan has now appreciated 9.9 per cent since it was revalued by 2.1 per cent in July 2005 and freed from a dollar peg to float within managed bands.

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