The Chinese pika belongs to the subgenus <Conothoa>. The species was first published by Thomas (1911) as a subspecies of the gray pika (<Ochotona roylei chinensis>). After the publication, no scientist has collected and studied this taxon. Russian scientist Lissovsky (2013) believed that this taxon belonged to the big-eared pika (<Ochotona macrotis>) without collecting specimens. More than a hundred years later, Liu Shaoying et al. collected the ground model specimen of this taxon again in 2017. Phylogenetic studies at the genome level confirmed that this taxon is an independent species (Wang et al., 2020), which is only distributed in Sichuan.
