This paper discusses data used in publishing statistics on earnings, the distribution of
household income and poverty in China by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) which is
widely used by policy makers, international agencies and researchers. Unlike many other
countries, China until recently had a dual system of household surveys - one rural and one
urban. This has had consequences for providing official data on wages, income and poverty
which we discuss along with other challenges. Since the end of the 1980s, researchers have
been active in the construction of large databases aimed at mapping earnings, household
income and poverty, and we present seven of these in the paper.