Background: The concept of shared decision making has received increasing interest in recent years. But both patients and doctors still have difficulties in shared decision making in China. Objectives: To investigate the attitudes of both doctors and patients towards shared decision making and to provide evidence of how pervasive this decision making is. Methods: Two different questionnaires were developed concerning patient involvement in decision making and distributed to doctors and patients separately during the summer of 2008 by a group of volunteer medical students. SPASS and MS Excel were used to analyze the data. Results: 273 questionnaires were distributed at random to in-patient and out-patient doctors, of which 259 were completed with some items left blank. The sample of doctors had a mean age of 35 and over 44% were above undergraduate education. 529 questionnaires were collected from patients with some items blank representing 49% male and 51% female. Over 95% of patients wanted their doctors to seek their opinions before making treatment decisions, while 61% of doctors thought it difficult to share decisions with patients. Over 95% of patients hoped to get information before decision making, over 60% wanted to learn information from doctors, while 63% of doctors thought it difficult to provide high quality evidence to patients. Over 20% of patients were not satisfied with their recent treatments, especially when communicating with doctors, while 67% of doctors thought there was no difficulty in communication. Eighty-seven per cent of patients thought that the biggest problem in seeing the doctors was limited time, while 79% of doctors thought it difficult to have enough time to communicate with their patients. Conclusions: There is a gap between doctors and patients in shared decision making. It is therefore very urgent for us to develop some strategies to promote shared decision making in China.