By searching the information in Chinese Core Journal Series, Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index(CSSCI) and Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), for the purpose of describing the process and progress of modern tourism research in China, a comprehensive statistical study of domestic tourism journals and papers in the past 30 years was carried out. The results showed that the three major databases indexed 429 Chinese journals involved in tourism research and 16791 papers about tourism with economic and geographic research for application as the two main directions. Tourism paper publication can be divided into four periods according to the number of articles and the relevant fields. Before 1990, tourism research fields expanded rapidly, covering 89.2% of all the directions, while the post-2000 period had the largest number of papers, accounting for 71.42% of the total. Most of the papers were submitted from colleges and universities, followed by the institutes. Paper publication can reflect the progress of Chinese tourism research. It can be concluded that rapid development of tourism industry resulted in great achievements in tourism research since the national reform and opening up in 1978. Chinese modern tourism research originated from traditional disciplines such as geography and economics, and gradually formed a inter-disciplinary and application-oriented subject. The research outcomes has been booming after 2000, while the disciplinary framework was constructed before 1990. Professional academic institutions became the principal organizations for studying. In the future, there are four main challenges: to enhance the status of tourism science, to strengthen fundamental research, to build the unique disciplinary system and to inteping; and to improve the research quality.