One focus of this morning's press conference was on June's consumer price index. The NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said China's CPI rose 2.9 percent year on year in June. The CPI is the main gauge for tracking China's inflation.

The figure stood at 2.6 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year. For several months, the CPI has seen an upward trend. But with the month-on-month change of consumer prices going down by 0.1 percent in May, there is general expectation that China's inflation will wane in the second half.

NBS officials have said inflation was higher due to a low comparison basis from the same period last year and was also pushed up by rising food prices. But on a month-on-month basis, the vegetable and fruit price drop in June, combined to represent a 0.5 percent drop in CPI. The NBS spokesman also clarified previous reports saying many provinces have seen their CPI pass 3 percent.

Sheng Laiyun, Spokesman, National Bureau of Statistics, said, "We have 31 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions in China. 17 of them saw a CPI growth higher than 2.9 percent. 12 others lower than that figure. And still 2 others were on par.

But the 12 provinces, municipalities and administrative regions are mainly heavily populated provincial administrative regions, for example, Sichuan, Henan, Hubei and Shandong. So the weighted average of the country's CPI growth was 2.9 percent."

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