Consumer prices excluding food and energy, as a change over twelve months, read from the National Bureau of Statistics' monthly release. Core inflation strips out pork and fuel, which dominate China's headline index.

Threshold source: Deflation watch: core prices rising less than half a percent a year has marked China's weakest demand since 2009. How thresholds are chosen

Read from the text of a monthly web release rather than a data feed, so a change in the publisher's page layout stops the series until the parser is updated. The index was rebased to 2025 in January 2026.