This chapter evaluates age reporting among the oldest-old, especially centenarians, in the Chinese
Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) based on comparisons of various indices of elderly
age reporting and age distributions of centenarians in Sweden, Japan, England and Wales, Australia,
Canada, China, the U.S.A., and Chile. The analyses demonstrate that age reporting among the oldestold
interviewees (Han and six minority groups combined) in the 22 provinces in China where the
CLHLS has been conducted is not as good as that in Sweden, Japan, and England and Wales, but is
relatively close to that in Australia, more or less the same as that in Canada, better than that in the
U.S.A, and much better than that in Chile. As indicated by the higher density of centenarians, age
exaggeration exists in the six ethnic minority groups in the 22 Han-dominated provinces, although we
cannot rule out and quantify the potential impacts of past mortality selection and better natural
environmental conditions among these minority groups. We find that the age exaggeration of
minorities in the CLHLS may not cause substantial biases in demographic and statistical analyses
using the CLHLS data, since minorities consist of a rather small portion of the sample (6.8 percent at
baseline and 5.5 percent in the grand total sample of the 1998, 2000, and 2002 waves).