The RTN4 gene on chromosome 2p13-14 has been reported to be over-expressed in schizophrenia by a cDNA subtractive hybridization experiment between postmortem human frontal cerebral cortices from Canadian schizophrenia individuals and neurological controls. The same study also reported a high prevalence of homozygous CAA insertion in the schizophrenia. In a replication attempt to investigate the role of RTN4 in the etiology of schizophrenia, we genotyped the CAA insertion polymorphism and other three genetic polymorphisms (a TATC deletion in the 3'-untranslated region and two single nucleotide polymorphisms in the 5' region) within RTN4 and conducted a case-control study in the Chinese population. There were no significant discrepancies in allele and genotype frequencies of the four polymorphisms individually and haplotype distribution between the cases and the controls. Our current data suggest that the genetic polymorphisms within RTN4 are unlikely to confer an increased susceptibility to schizophrenia in the Chinese population.