Following the increasing investment in basic research in China, the outputs of basic research have been greatly enhanced. In this paper, its relative efficiency of performance in basic research is analysed by adopting statistical regressions and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method. Preliminary results show that injecting investments into basic research seems to be the main driving power for the increased research outputs in China. It is found that there were significant improvements on overall efficiency from 1991 to 1996, although this trend has noticeably slowed down since 1996. Possible causes of this slow-down are discussed.