AbstractIn this paper, we first summarise the progress for the famous Chern conjecture, and then we consider n-dimensional closed hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature H in the unit sphere n+1 with n ≤ 8 and generalise the result of Cheng et al. (Q. M. Cheng, Y. J. He and H. Z. Li, Scalar curvature of hypersurfaces with constant mean curvature in a sphere, Glasg. Math. J. 51(2) (2009), 413–423). In order to be precise, we prove that if |H| ≤ ϵ(n), then there exists a constant δ(n, H) > 0, which depends only on n and H, such that if S0 ≤ S ≤ S0 + δ(n, H), then S = S0 and M is isometric to the Clifford hypersurface, where ϵ(n) is a sufficiently small constant depending on n.