Scientifically presenting the evolution path of China’ s equity incentive research and tracking its research frontier are of great significance in the economic transition process of China. However, there is little literature review on equity incentive research of China, especially the lack of scientific and objective literature induction and summary based on bibliometrics method. So, the present study takes the research literatures on equity incentive in CSSCI database up to 2018 as the research object, and formulates the advanced strategy of document data collection (retrieval type: keywords = equity incentives or keywords = stock options or keywords = restricted stocks), and then designs a four-step data cleaning process based on DEAN. What’s more, this study adopts bibliometrics software CitespaceV and Statistical Analysis Toolkit for Informetrics SATI3.2 to quantitatively describe and visually analyze the text data of the final 981 valid documents focusing on equity incentive in China through quantitative statistics, document co-citation analysis, keyword frequency analysis, keyword cluster analysis and keyword bursts analysis and manual analysis of literature contents. Specially, with the help of quantitative statistics on text data, the overall framework of equity incentive research of China is described, including the core authors (Xu Ning, Xiao Shufang and Lyu Changjiang), the high-production institutions (Fudan University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Xi’an Jiaotong University and Central University of Finance and Economics, etc.) and high-production journals (Economic Management, Statistics and Decision, Productivity Research and Accounting Research, etc.). Besides, this research reveals evolution path, hotspots and research frontiers of this field in China through bibliometric analysis and manual induction. The results show that the evolution path of equity incentive research of China presented the overall characteristics which originated from the conceptual stage (1998-2002) introducing concepts and modes of equity incentive, via the initial development stage (2003-2009) discussing on equity incentive effect, endogenous problems, etc., finally to the diffusion development stage (2010-2018) analyzing senior management behavior, equity incentive contract elements, motivation and positioning of equity incentive, etc. Incentive targets, state-owned enterprises, operating performance and earnings management are hot research topics; while earnings management, salary incentive, executive incentive, restricted stock and risk sharing may be the current frontier areas.This study demonstrates that the research on equity incentive is an evolving process. In practice, there are three major trends in Chinese equity incentive: restricted stock has become the most important equity incentive model; State-owned enterprises are increasingly becoming the main body of equity incentive; Ordinary employees are becoming an important incentive object of equity incentive. Based on this, this study proposes the research on restricted stock and equity incentive of state-owned enterprises. This study is helpful for scholars to grasp the research context of equity incentive of China from the whole and can promote the theoretical development of equity incentive research.