Abstract: The evaluation of applicability of the reanalysis datasets is crucial to their application. The reliability of surface pressure in China obtained respectively from the reanalysis datasets is focused on, i. e. , ERA-40, NCEP/NCAR and NCEP/DOE. The analysis is carried out in different regions, different seasons and different periods with compared to the station observations over China.The results indicate that mean values of the three reanalysis products could basically display spatio-temporal consistence with observation. However, the differences found among them are more obvious in the western China than in the eastern China, and is more significant in summer than in winter. At the same time, the differences among the ERA-40, NCEP/NCAR and the observations are stronger before 1970s, and the significant systematic bias could be detected from the mean value of NCEP/DOE and the observations, but the ERA-40 is closer than the NCEP/NCAR and NCEP/DOE to the observations over most parts of China, especially in the west of China.The results also indicate that three reanalysis products all can represent the interannual variations and the linear climate trends displayed by the observations in most regions of China to a certain extent, but the discrepancies among them still has a certain regional and seasonal dependency. The most obvious differences among them can be detected in the west areas, especially the Tibet Plateau and the surrounding regions in sumer. In terms of the agreement with the observations, the ERA-40 is more consistent with observations, but the NCEP/NCAR overestimate interdecadal variations for most areas of China in summer due to the tremendously "low" value before 1970s.In conclusion, the reliability and applicability the surface pressure of ERA-40 are better than those of NCEP/NCAR and NCEP/DOE in most areas of China. The possible causes may be that more observing data, such as surface air temperature, surface pressure and so on, have been used in the ERA-40 assimilation systems, while the data used by the NCEP assimilation systems only include the observed wind field.