China is the world’s biggest fishing nation and a major player in the global seafood trade. Its fisheries development can decisively influence the global seafood trade, food security and marine conservation. In recent years, significant changes have taken place in China’s fisheries management priorities, policies and regulations. In this paper, we review the evolving fisheries management practices in China to delineate changes in the management policies, methods and their performances from 1949 to 2019. We determined that the following issues impede the development, implementation and enforcement of fisheries policies and regulations, namely the large size of the fishing fleet, large and poorly organized fisheries population, the “hidden” fishing capacity, uniform management approaches that sometimes fail to account for local conditions, lack of clearly defined and allocated fishing rights, limited data quality and availability, insufficient fisheries monitoring programmes, absence of a robust scientific input framework and insufficient stakeholder involvement. Combining those problems with China’s current management initiatives, we propose recommendations for China’s future fisheries reforms. We hope this paper can inform China’s marine fisheries policies and provide valuable references for further researches related to China’s sustainable fisheries management.