A daily gridded precipitation dataset (APHRO) for Asia was created by the Asian Precipitation-Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards the Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) project in Japan. The resolution of this dataset is 0.25°×0.25°, and the length is from 1951 to 2007. This study aims to assess the quality of the APHRO rainfall in contiguous China from the perspective of climatological mean, rainfall classes, and long-term trend. Daily rainfall records observed by 559 rain gauges are used for the comparison. The results are as follows: (1) For the mean states, the APHRO shows similar distribution of precipitation amount to station data, and can accurately characterize the seasonal migration of rain-belt. However, compared with station data, this dataset underestimates precipitation intensity, but overestimates precipitation frequency.(2) For the distribution of different classes of precipitation, annual mean precipitation amount for heavy rainfall derived from the APHRO data is lower, while the amounts for light and moderate rainfall are higher than the station data.(3) The trends of precipitation amount in China during 1956－2005 derived from two dataset are identical, the trends of precipitation frequency are also highly consistent, and both show an “increase in the west but decrease in the east” pattern. A large difference between the two datasets is found in the spatial pattern of precipitation intensity trends. The precipitation intensity derived from station data shows an increasing trend throughout the Chinese mainland in the past 50 years; the APHRO data exhibit a similar trend in the southeastern coastal region and northwestern China, but a different pattern in northern China, northeastern China, and Jianghuai region. In addition, analysis on the seasonality of interdecadal variability indicates that the characteristics of “southern China food and northern China drought” and “Jiangnan late spring drought” derived from the APHRO data are different from those derived from station data. The APHRO data tend to underestimate the trends.