There is a marked sexual dimorphism: the adult male is distinguished by its very black crown, while that of the female is the same blue-grey as the back, or at most dark gray when the plumage is worn.

In both sexes, a dark gray eyestripe extends in front of and behind the eye, topped by a clear white supercilium separating it from the crown.

The Chinese nuthatch lives from central China to the northeast of the country, as far as Korea and the extreme southeast of Russia.

Because the bird's range is so large and numbers do not appear to decline significantly, the International Union for Conservation of Nature considers the species to be of "least concern".

The Chinese nuthatch was described in 1865 by the French ornithologist Jules Verreaux, based on specimens sent from Beijing by the missionary Armand David in 1862,[3][4] who also referred to it as Sitta pekinensis in 1867.

[5] Verreaux described the species as close to red-breasted nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) but with long, silky plumage, and thus gave the specific name "villosa", from the Latin for "hairy".

With its phylogeny established, Pasquet concludes that the paleogeographic history of the group would be as follows: the divergence between the two main clades of the "canadensis group" appears to have occurred more than five million years ago, at the end of the Miocene, when the common ancestor of krueperi and ledanti entered the Mediterranean basin at the time of the Messinian salinity crisis; the two species diverged 1.75 million years ago.

1] The upperparts of the Chinese nuthatch are blue-gray, with the crown shiny black to dark gray; the underparts are light, ranging from dull buff-gray to cinnamon orange.

The female is overall duller than the male, notably with the scapulars less vivid, the wing feathers edged with brown and the underparts darker and less colored.

[13] The subspecies S. v. corea is paler, more grayish, and smaller than the nominate subspecies[13][9] This species is locally found in sympatry with the Eurasian nuthatch (S. europaea), but differs from it in its smaller size, clearly visible white supercilium, black crown in males, and relatively plain underparts, lacking the reddish undertail coverts and flanks.

[14] In winter, the Chinese nuthatch's diet consists primarily of nuts, seeds, and tree fruits.

The nest is usually placed high in the cavity of a conifer (more than 9 m (350 in) above the ground, on average), but can also be built in a rotten stump or in an old building.

[17] In China, it inhabits coniferous forests (Pinus, Picea), sometimes mixed with oaks (Quercus) and birches (Betula).

[14] In the summer of 2006, Dutchmen on an entomological expedition incidentally observed a pair of nuthatches nesting in the Altai, more or less on the crossing of China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia, in a pure larch (Larix sp.)

If the European nuthatch is present in the region (subspecies asiatica), the observers assure that the black crown of the male and the small size of the individuals exclude a misidentification with this Eurasian species.

The closest species geographically that could fit this description is the Chinese nuthatch, which would then be far from its known distribution (1,500 km (930 mi) from the breeding range), and which has more buffy underparts than the observed individuals.

[19] In June 2017, during the breeding season, two Swiss ornithologists searched for this nuthatch at the reporting site, staying five nights to prospect in the surrounding forests from the tree line to the valley floor.

Total numbers are not known, but Mark Brazil's guide to East Asian birds places the species in the infrequent category in China (corresponding to a range of 100 to 10,000 mature pairs)[17][21] and less than 1,000 migratory individuals are estimated in Korea.

[21] Populations are possibly declining due to the destruction of the bird's habitat, but the species is considered to be of "least concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.