China's consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, rose 1.9 percent year on year in December last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced Thursday.

The figure rose sharply from the 0.6 percent rise in November when the index ended nine months of decline, it said.

The producer price index (PPI), a major measure of inflation at the wholesale level, rose 1.7 percent in December from a year earlier, the first monthly rise since December 2008.