Abstract: Environmental impact assessment (EIA) system plays an important role in preventing environmental pollution and ecological damage from the source and is an important way for environmental protection to participate in comprehensive decision-making. The implementation of the Environmental Impact Assessment Law of the People's Republic of China in 2003 established the legal status of EIA as an environmental management system, which is a milestone in the development of China's EIA system. In the twenty years since the EIA Law was implemented, China's EIA system has achieved rapid development from project EIA to planning EIA, and then to large regional strategic EIA and policy EIA. Based on the research and practice progress of the EIA system, the identification of the existing deficiencies is helpful to provide a reference for the development of China's EIA system in the next stage. Firstly, the development of the EIA system was reviewed, and then the research progress of China's EIA system in the past 20 years was summarized and hot spots analyzed based on the method of bibliometrics and visual analysis. Combined with the analysis results, the practice progress of China's EIA system was summarized. Finally, some suggestions were provided including strengthening the cohesion between the EIA system and the pollutant discharge permit system, strengthening the supervision in process and afterwards, improving the legal position of planning EIA, strengthening the development of policy EIA and improving the effectiveness of public participation, to further improve the effectiveness of China's EIA system, and achieve sustainable improvement of ecological environment quality and high-quality economic development.