China’s consumer inflation rose to new highs in December, amid an African swine fever crisis which sent pork prices soaring by 97.0 per cent from a year earlier. Overall, the consumer price index (CPI) rose by 4.5 per cent in the last month of the decade from a year earlier, flat from November and below an analyst poll by Bloomberg, which forecast 4.7 per cent growth. Within the CPI, food prices rose by 17.4 per cent in December from a year earlier, with pork prices nearly doubling from a year ago, new data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday showed. Non-food prices rose 1.3 per cen ... (full story)