During its history of over three decades, Chinese sociolinguistics has by now developed its own characteristics, which are shown especially in the studies of speech community, linguistic urbanization and language strategy. The variationist tradition in sociolinguistics was followed in China but was henceforth developed into the study of speech community, which in turn motivated the study on the linguistic consequences of urbanization. In time, the application-conscious Chinese linguists brought sociolinguistic findings into the theory and practice of language planning and policy and initiated the research direction of language strategy.