Health Soc Care Community. 2019;27:31–42. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hsc | 31 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1 | INTRODUCTION Establishing the prevalence of all forms of violence against women (VAW) has been a priority since the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women known as CEDAW, adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly. CEDAW does not explicitly mention VAW, but Articles 12 and 19 clarify the Convention includes VAW and makes detailed recommendations to State parties (Commonwealth of Australia & Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 2008). CEDAW was followed by the 1993 Accepted: 4 March 2018 DOI: 10.1111/hsc.12572 REVIEW Is gender important? Victimisation and perpetration of intimate partner violence in mainland China Jan Breckenridge B Soc. Stud (Hons), PhD 1 | Ting Yang PhD 2 | Abner Weng Cheong Poon BA, MSW, PhD 1 1 School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, NSW, Australia 2 School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China Correspondence Ting Yang, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China. Email: yangting.511@163.com Abstract Establishing the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) has been recom- mended by International Conventions and Declarations for some time beginning with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Articles 12 and 19) in 1979. One important recommendation of such inter- national protocols is the implementation of national population prevalence surveys to establishing IPV as a serious social issue globally, which is intended to provide data for planning effective responses within signatory countries. However, not all coun- tries have undertaken national prevalence surveys meaning that there are gaps in our understanding of who are the perpetrators and victims of IPV in different cultural contexts. This article presents the results of a scoping review of literature examining gender differences in prevalence rates of victimisation and perpetration of IPV in mainland China (hereon China). There has been little written about the prevalence of IPV in China generally, and this scoping process located only nine peer-reviewed ar- ticles written in both English- and Chinese-language journals focusing on both gen- der and IPV published between 1997 and 2016. Results of this scoping review demonstrate that while both women and men perpetrate IPV in China, the preva- lence rates of different types of IPV reflect gender differences in both perpetration and victimisation, suggesting that IPV is not a unitary phenomenon. The paper con- cludes by discussing the implications of the findings including the importance of in- creasing awareness of IPV in China more generally and developing gender-specific interventions to directly address different types of IPV. Directions for future re- search are also canvassed. KEYWORDS China, gender asymmetry, intimate partner violence, prevalence, scoping review, violence against women