In 1993 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international non-profit organization aiming at producing, updating and disseminating systematic reviews, was founded. Several years later, in 1999, the Chinese Cochrane centre opened in Chengdu, to provide support to (1) Chinese researchers willing to produce reviews and (2) politicians and practitioners willing to start using the results in daily practice. We searched PubMed and the database of the Chinese Cochrane Centre to retrieve data on the overall number of articles and reviews produced in the Chinese language for the period 1990 to 2006. Although the number of reviews increased substantially since the year 2000, the percentage of reviews in the overall number of articles indexed in PubMed remains modest.