BEIJING - Home prices in major Chinese cities continued to climb despite repeated government efforts to cool the sector, official data showed on Saturday.

Of a statistical pool of 70 major Chinese cities, 65 saw a month-on-month rise in new home prices and 64 reported price gains in existing and second-hand homes in December last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced in an online statement.

More cities saw price growth easing in December, a result the senior NBS statistician Liu Jianwei attributed to a raft of government efforts to stabilize market expectation, including more control measures and increasing supplies of affordable housing.

Monthly price gains in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen retreated 0.1 percentage point, 0.1 percentage point, 0.1 percentage point and 0.4 percentage point, respectively, from those seen a month earlier.

On a yearly basis, all the cities but Wenzhou reported gains in new home prices.

First-tier cities continued to lead rises last month, with the prices of new homes in Beijing and Shanghai surging over 20 percent from a year ago, but Liu said the trend has been losing momentum.