OBJECTIVES: Our objective was to explore potential challenges in conducting pharmacoeconomic evaluation (PE) analyses in China through a literature review on quality assessment of Chinese PE studies.  METHODS: Literature reviews including a quality assessment of PE studies conducted in China were identified through PubMed, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases and grey literature. Results of quality assessment and reported limitations of PE studies were collected and summarized.  RESULTS: Fourteen reviews assessing the quality of PE studies were identified. Different quality assessment tools were used, with the Quality of Health Economic Studies (QHES) scale being the most common (n=7). Other tools used included: CHEC-list, China PE guidelines, BMJ economic submission guidelines and ISPOR’s CHEERS checklist. References using QHES showed PE studies scored 64.5/100 on average (range 59-80/100). Twelve references considered only PEs reported in Chinese, one reference considered only studies in English and one considered both languages. When considering QHES, the quality of PE published in English was better than those published in Chinese (80/100 vs. 62/100). The main reported limitations of PE studies were: authors seldom stating perspective and funding source, inappropriate choices for comparators or analysis methods, seldom consideration of long-term effects, indirect costs, discounting and subgroup analyses, and lack of discussion about generalizability and extrapolation of results. Suggested reasons for low quality were: absence of Chinese guidelines until 2011, researchers’ lack of knowledge and experience in PE, unavailability of key data, guidelines hard to follow and lacking recognition, journals not requiring reporting standards for PE publication, and lack of attention to PE in China.  CONCLUSIONS: This synthesis of assessments of the quality of Chinese PEs performed in published literature reviews suggests that improvements are possible. Collaborative initiatives among researchers, guidelines developers, journals and policy makers may help raising the quality standards of future economic studies.