China has a huge territory and the biggest population in the world, with a considerable disparity between regions in social, economic and health development. Health policy, therefore, needs to accommodate the regional variation in order to effectively promote health development.

    There are two classification systems of regions currently being applied in health policy research and practice in China. First, the State Council divided the whole countries into three economic regions in 1986, that is, east, middle and west regions. A second system with three categories of urban cities and four categories of rural areas has been used by the National Health Survey since 1993. These two classification systems have shown their limitations in health policy research and practice during the social and economic development in the last decades.

    CCHDS research team is working on re-classification of regions for health development in China, through a series of activities including identifying key indicators, developing an Index of Health Development, and statistical classification.