China has lifted a ban that prevented cooking oil producers from raising prices, the most concrete policy action yet from the government to show that it believes inflation is coming under control.

Cooking oil is so essential to Chinese kitchens that officials had previously worried that allowing prices to rise might spark social unrest. Prices were unofficially frozen last November, but Beijing has struggled since then to put a lid on inflation, which has been running at a three-year high.

Wilmar International, a Singapore-listed agribusiness group that is the biggest player in the Chinese edible oil market, told the Financial Times that it had raised prices by an average of 5 per cent this week after submitting an “informal request” to the National Development and Reform Commission, the powerful central planning agency that polices pricing in China.