The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) recently announced plans to increase the weight of residential factors in CPI's composition, allowing it to reflect living expenses.

Residential factors, including rent, mortgage rates, property management charges and house maintenance costs, currently make up 14.7 percent of the CPI, while food prices account for 32 percent.

In addition, mortgage rates are likely to be replaced by a weighted number of house prices and mortgage rates, said the NBS.

Analysts believe this represents a stride forward in the country's economic survey, though it may intensify fluctuations of the index.

But it is impossible to directly put property prices in the CPI basket, said Wei Guixiang, Director of the Department of Urban Social and Economic Survey under the NBS.

After all, houses are more a kind of investment than consumer products, and it has been a global trend to exclude house prices from the CPI, he said.

But Yi Xianrong, a senior researcher with the Institute of Finance and Banking at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, disagreed. Unlike Western countries, a majority of Chinese buy houses for themselves, not to rent out or resell, so it is necessary to lend more weight to property prices as part of the CPI, said Yi.