As a kind of fixed phrase, Chinese idiom is a very important part of Chinese vocabulary, and it has stable structure and complete meaning. From the 1970s, many researchers have been focusing on the study of the form, meaning, grammar, pragmatics of Chinese idioms. Based on the related literatures, the research on Chinese idioms is compartmentalized into three periods： the initial stage, the developing stage and deepening stage. This paper tries to summarize the main content and characteristic of the different research periods and to tease out its overall developing regulation in order to provide some references for future study.