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China's consumer price index (CPI), the main gauge of inflation, rose 5.5 percent year-on-year in May, reaching a 34-month high, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.

?Fact box

• CPI up 5.5%

??PPI up 6.8%

? Industrial ouput up 13.3%

? Retail sales up 16.9%

? Fixed asset investment?up 25.8%

CPI rose 5.2 percent year-on-year in the first five months of the year, NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said.

Food prices, which account for nearly a third of the basket of goods in the nation's CPI calculation, surged 11.7 percent in May from a year earlier. The pace of increase accelerated from April's 11.5-percent rise.

Growth in non-food prices also accelerated, rising by 2.9 percent in May from a year earlier, Sheng said. April's non-food prices increased 2.7 percent year-on-year.

Compared with April, food prices slid 0.3 percent in May, of which vegetable prices plunged 9.3 percent month-on-month.

The producer price index (PPI), a main gauge of inflation at the wholesale level, rose 6.8 percent in May from a year ago, unchanged from April's annual growth.

Industrial output in May rose 13.3 percent from a year earlier, beating previous?expectations for an increase of 13.2 percent.

China's retail sales of consumer goods rose 16.9 percent year-on-year to 1.47 trillion yuan (226.77 billion U.S. dollars) in May this year.

The central government has taken keeping inflation under control as the top priority, but the task is quite difficult despite a series of measures have been taken, including raising interest rates four times and banks' reserve requirement ratio eight times?since October.

Meanwhile, the worries are raised that a cooling down in China's economy is looming large as data pointed to a?gloomy outlook. China's new bank lending shrank in May and money supply grew at the slowest pace since 2008. Purchasing Managers Index?showed the factory sector expanded in May at it slowest pace in at least nine months.

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