A downlink information processing method, user equipment, a base station, and a communications system are disclosed. In one aspect, a method performed by a terminal device such as user equipment (UE) includes: determining that a cell-specific frequency shift of downlink information is equal to a cell-specific frequency shift of a cell-specific reference signal (CRS), determining a resource element location according to the cell-specific frequency shift of the downlink information, where a duration of a transmission time interval (TTI) to which the resource element location belongs is less than or equal to a time length of one timeslot, receiving the downlink information at the resource element location, and demodulating downlink data according to the downlink information.