A key goal of the network is to expand scholarly access to appropriate data. These include the China census, the surveys of China's floating populations, and various city surveys. The network will also develop useful materials for urban researchers including geographic information systems (GIS) maps of Chinese cities, with associated small-area data, and various bibliographic resources. Within constraints of confidentiality and restrictions placed by donors, data, maps and papers will be made available to researchers through the Internet. Our intention is to accumulate many more such materials for research on urban China, and to continue to make these more accessible to the academic community.
The Multi-City Study of Urban China is a collaborative project of a group of scholars who have been meeting together since 2001 as a working group of the Urban China Research Network. We include:
Our goal is to promote new research on issue of urban change and spatial restructuring in Chinese cities through collection of original data, research collaborations on specific urban issues, and workshops and conferences.
Group members have assembled a unique set of recent resident surveys in a variety of cities. We welcome other scholars to consider using these data for new purposes.
Two surveys are available for public use without restriction: the China Housing Survey conducted in 1993 by Yanjie Bian (University of Minnesota) and John Logan (Brown University) and State and Life Chances in Urban China conducted in 1994 by Xueguang Zhou (Stanford University).
Use of the other more recent surveys requires prior consent by the Principal Investigator who led data collection in the city whose data will be used.
Si-ming Li is PI for most of these datasets: Beijing (1996, 2001), Guangzhou (1996, 2001, 2005), and Shanghai (2005).
Fulong Wu is PI for Nanjing (2005).
John Logan is PI for for Beijing (2006).
Click HERE to see the list of available surveys.
Data Distributed by Other Websites
IPUMS-International is a new project dedicated to collecting and distributing census data from around the world at MPC center at University of Minnesota. China 1982 was released March 2003. Please note that to download data, users must register. Otherwise use "guest" as username and password to view all pages of the site.
China Dimensions is a data clearinghouse under the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), part of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). You will find a variety of socioeconomic data in this site, including Geographic Information System (GIS) databases that cover the administrative regions of China. These databases may be integrated with agricultural, land use, environmental, and socioeconomic data to track China's economic growth, population increases, and environmental change. Currently, the data categories include: administrative regions, fundamental maps, population and public health, economics and public policy.
The CDC is part of the China Initiatives at UM. It provides online China maps, free online bibliography, and a list of statistical yearbooks. You can order various statistical yearbooks, Chinese papers and documents from them (for a fee).
This is the official website of the China State Statistical Bureau. It provides constantly updated statistics-related news, documents and government policies, and most importantly all kinds statistics. There are online China Statistical Yearbooks for 1997-2000, monthly and yearly statistical reports, survey data, census results and other statistics.
ICPSR provides many China-related survey data sets. Here are a list of data sets you can access through ICPSR.
China Household Income Project 1988 by Keith Griffin and Renwei Zhao
Chinese Household Income Project 1995 by Riskin, Carl, Renwei Zhao and Li Shi
Four-County Study of Chinese Local Government and Political Economy 1990