The government aims to keep this year's overall CPI rise under 4 per cent.
The CPI fell 0.2 per cent from a month earlier.
March inflation was the highest since July 2008, when prices rose 7.1 percent.
China's producer price index, a measure of wholesale factory prices that can be a leading indicator of inflation pressures, rose 7.3 per cent from a year earlier in March, the data showed, higher than February's 7.2 per cent rise.