Average Height in China (Men & Women)

How tall the average Chinese adult is

Chinese men born in 1996 reach an average adult height of 171.8 cm (5′8″), and Chinese women 159.7 cm (5′3″). Those figures are the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's estimates for mainland China, drawn from a 2016 pooled analysis of 1,472 measurement studies covering more than 18.6 million people in 200 countries. Among those 200 countries, Chinese men rank 94th and Chinese women 87th, which puts China almost exactly in the middle of the world table. The global median in the same data is about 171 cm for men and 159 cm for women.

The pages for 173 cm and 160 cm on this site sit close to these two averages and show what they look like on a body.

The meaning of the 1996 cohort

The headline figure describes a birth cohort, the people born in 1996, at age 18. It is not an average of everyone living in China today. NCD-RisC models height by year of birth because adults stop growing in their late teens and then keep roughly the same height for decades. That means each generation's height is a record of the childhood it had. Chinese adults born in the 1950s and those born in the 1990s grew up in very different conditions, and averaging them together would hide the change that is the most interesting part of China's story.

The researchers drew only on studies that measured height, rather than asking people to report it, and that sampled the general population. The paper notes that sub-national and community studies, which include many Chinese datasets, can differ from national ones and vary more. The model takes this into account.

A hundred years of growth

China gained height steadily throughout the century covered by the data, with no long plateau.

That adds up to 10.8 cm for men and 9.5 cm for women. The pace changed over time. Men gained 4 cm in the 30 years from 1896 to 1926, 3 cm from 1926 to 1956, only 1.3 cm in the 20 years to 1976, and then 2.5 cm in the 20 years to 1996. The slowdown for cohorts born between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s stands out. NCD-RisC's reference list includes a study of the long-term health and economic consequences of the 1959–1961 famine, one of several lines of research linking that period to the health of the generation that lived through it.

NCD-RisC's key finding about East Asia is that the rise is still going on in China. In Japan it stopped for people born after the early 1960s, and in South Korea men leveled off in the 1980s cohorts. The paper says the increase continues in China and Thailand, and that Chinese men and women have now passed their Japanese counterparts but are not yet as tall as South Koreans.

Overtaking Japan

The China–Japan comparison shows how much the ranking changed.

A century ago, Chinese adults were clearly taller than Japanese adults. Japan's very fast postwar growth reversed that for people born in the 1950s to 1970s. In the 1996 cohort, China is ahead again, by 1 cm for men and 1.4 cm for women. The Japan page covers the Japanese side of the story.

Survey data from inside China

China runs national student physique surveys and national nutrition and health surveys. Much of that data is published in Chinese and is not easy to compare across sources. One large English-language analysis, published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences in 2022 by Lu and colleagues, combined six rounds of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from 2008 to 2015, giving 57,574 valid responses from adults with an average age of 48.

Across all ages, the CGSS sample averaged 169.6 cm for men and 158.9 cm for women. That is close to the NCD-RisC estimates once you allow for the many older respondents. By year of birth, the tallest male cohort in the sample was born in 1993, at 173.9 cm, and the shortest was born in 1927, at 162.9 cm, a difference of about 11 cm. That closely matches the 10.8 cm gain in the NCD-RisC data.

One figure does not match. The CGSS paper puts women born after 1990 at about 163 cm, roughly 3 cm above the NCD-RisC estimate of 159.7 cm for the 1996 cohort. The paper does not describe interviewers measuring respondents, and CGSS is a social survey rather than a health examination, so the gap probably reflects how the data was collected. This page uses the NCD-RisC figure because it is built only from measured heights.

North versus south, and differences between ethnic groups

The best-known pattern in Chinese height is that northern Chinese tend to be taller than southern Chinese, and it has been documented for a century. The CGSS paper describes Li Ji's 1923 Harvard doctoral dissertation, which analyzed the heights of 5,081 Chinese people. Li found people in Guangdong, Yunnan, Guangxi, Hunan and Sichuan shorter than the national average, and people in Zhili (today's Hebei), Shandong and Henan taller.

The modern CGSS data shows the same pattern with some exceptions:

• The ten provinces with the tallest men were Tianjin, Shanghai, Beijing, Liaoning, Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Xinjiang, Ningxia and Jilin. Shanghai, in second place at 172.2 cm, is the only southern entry.
• The ten provinces with the tallest women were Ningxia, Qinghai, Tianjin, Liaoning, Xinjiang, Shanxi, Shandong, Henan, Hebei and Shanghai.
• The authors note that wealthy coastal provinces in the south, including Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, are taller than their latitude would predict. They attribute part of this to migration from the north.

Height also varies between ethnic groups. In the CGSS data, Manchu and Uygur respondents averaged over 165 cm and Mongolian and Hui respondents over 164 cm (men and women combined). Those figures were significantly higher than for Tibetan, Zhuang and other southern minority groups. The paper also cites a study of 17-year-old students from 18 ethnic minorities in 2010, which found Hui, Mongolian and Korean boys averaging over 170 cm.

The latitude pattern is a real statistical regularity, but the paper's explanation for it goes beyond what most height researchers would claim. The broader evidence on height, summarized below, points mainly to nutrition, disease and income.

Height in Chinese history

Skeletal studies suggest that Chinese height has risen and fallen before. The CGSS paper summarizes research on limb bones from tombs in Zhengzhou, which estimated average male height at 169.5 cm in the Han dynasty, 167.0 cm in the Tang and 164.5 cm in the Song, with women declining from 159.1 cm to 156.2 cm over the same periods. Other work it cites puts adult men in the Yellow River basin during the Qin and Han dynasties at about 166–168 cm. Estimates like these come from small numbers of skeletons and carry wide margins of error, but they suggest that modern Chinese adults have climbed back above the heights of a thousand years ago.

Why China grew taller

Our World in Data, reviewing the research, describes nutrition as one of the strongest determinants of adult height, with animal-source protein especially important. It notes, for example, that egg and milk protein score about twice as high as rice or wheat protein on a standard quality scale. The clearest sign of changing childhood conditions in China is the fall in stunting, the share of children under five who are too short for their age.

Those WHO and UNICEF survey estimates, compiled by Our World in Data, show stunting falling by about seven-eighths in 30 years. Children counted in the 1987 survey were born in the early-to-mid 1980s, so their adult height is already in the NCD-RisC data, which ends in 1996. Children born since 2000 grew up with far less stunting, so further gains in adult height are likely, but they are not yet captured in measured adult data.

China among its neighbors

China sits in the middle of East Asia. Chinese adults are taller than Japanese, Mongolian and Vietnamese adults but shorter than South Koreans, Taiwanese and people in Hong Kong, which NCD-RisC lists separately. Chinese men are almost 7 cm taller than Indian men, a gap that did not exist for people born in 1896. The full list is on the average height by country hub.

Famous outliers and everyday reality

China has produced some very tall athletes. Basketball center Yao Ming is listed on this site at 229 cm (7′6″), about 57 cm above the national male average. Outliers like that tell us little about the typical person. A Chinese man of average height stands about 172 cm, a few centimeters shorter than an average American or Russian man and a few centimeters taller than an average Japanese man. A woman of average height stands just under 160 cm.

To compare a specific height with these averages, the height percentile calculator gives a percentile against reference data. Remember that China's average is still moving. The children of the 1996 cohort are growing up with much lower stunting than their parents did, and if the pattern NCD-RisC describes continues, they should end up taller still.