In recent years, with the booming economy, the Chinese government has increased its financial input to biotechnology research, which has led to remarkable achievements by China in modern biotechnology. As one of the key parts of modern biotechnology, industrial biotechnology will be crucial for China's sustainable development in this century. This review presents an overview of Chinese industrial biotechnology in last 10 years. Modern biotechnology had been classified into metabolic engineering and systems biology framework. Metabolic engineering is a field of broad fundamental and practical concept so we integrated the related technology achievements into the real practices of many metabolic engineering cases, such as biobased products production, environmental control and others. Now metabolic engineering is developing towards the systems level. Chinese researchers have also embraced this concept and have contributed invaluable things in genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and related bioinformatics. A series of advanced laboratories or centers were established which will represent Chinese modern biotechnology development in the near future. At the end of this review, metabolic network research advances have also been mentioned.