Although the global community recognizes that pneumonia is an important public health issue in China, the disease burden is not well studied nor necessarily reported in the English language and these data have not been systematically reviewed for English-or Chinese-language readers [8] . Complicating an assessment of the pneumonia incidence and mortality in China is the lack of ongoing and systematic surveillance. With the exception of human avian influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), pneumonia and other respiratory diseases are not included in the 39 nationally notifiable infectious diseases in China [9] . However, in the wake of the 2003 SARS outbreak, enhanced surveillance using pneumonia of unknown etiology for early detection of suspected SARS was initiated in 2004 (case definition given in Table S1 ). We conducted a systematic review of the Chinese-and Englishlanguage literature in order to describe pneumonia incidence and mortality in China, evaluate the quality of published studies, and identify gaps in the literature that can be addressed through surveillance and epidemiologic research projects in the future.