China's consumer price index (CPI), a main gauge of inflation, dipped 1.1 percent year on year in the first nine months of this year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

The September CPI was up 0.4 percent over the previous month.

However, the NBS did not provide the reading of September CPI on an annual basis. CPI declined 1.2 percent in August from a year earlier, the seventh consecutive month of decline since the index dropped 1.6 percent in February, the first fall since October 2002.