Abstract: Water quality criteria (WQC) for the protection of human health is used to protect human health from adverse effect of pollutants in water when consuming drinking water and aquatic products. Study on WQC was carried out in recent years, but report about human health WQC was lacking. Human health WQC characteristic parameters like exposure factors of Chinese population and parameters of water quality were required in developing WQC values protected for Chinese population. Human health WQC characteristic parameters (body weight (BW), drinking water intake (DI), fish intake (FI), dissolved organic carbon (DOC), particulate organic carbon (POC) concentration and lipid fraction) were studied and recommended in this work. The recommended exposure factors of BW, DI and FI for the general population were 61.9 kg, 2.785 L/d and 0.0301 kg/d, recommended DOC and POC concentrations were 2.68 and 0.73 mg/L, and recommended lipid fractions for trophic level 2, 3 and 4 were 2.47%, 3.08% and 3.16%, respectively. Human health WQC for 12 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) based on the above recommended characteristic parameters were derived in this work. Among the WQC values of 12 PAHs, WQC value for benzo (a) pyrene is the lowest (4.53×10^-4 μg/L), and anthracene is the highest (173 μg/L). In addition, we suggest that the human health risk from intake of aquatic product should be adequately considered (except for only considering the pollutants in drinking water) in the development of water quality criteria of surface water in China. According to the large difference of human health WQC values based on the characteristic parameters from different region, age group and carcinogenic risk level, we also suggest that the differences of characteristic parameters from different region, age group and carcinogenic risk level should be considered.