Following the successful completion of the first two Chinese household income (CHIP) surveys for 1988 and 1995, a new survey project team, composed of researchers from the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) together with associated Chinese and international scholars, and with the assistance of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), conducted a third survey in the spring of 2003 for the reference year 2002. The aim of the third survey was to examine the dynamic changes in income distribution in China that had taken place since 1988 and 1995.

Project teams from the 1988 and 1995 surveys published their analyses and research results in two volumes, Griffin and Zhao (1993) and Riskin, Zhao, and Li (2001). The first of these volumes contains an appendix describing the sampling method and data description for the 1988 survey, but the second volume lacks such an appendix for the 1995 survey. In view of this, and since most of the chapters in this volume use data from both the 1995 and 2002 surveys, this appendix describes both the 1995 and 2002 samples.

The CHIP surveys are closely related to the NBS household surveys, so we first give a brief explanation of how the NBS household survey samples were selected. We then describe the sampling method and data for the 1995 and 2002 surveys.