Under the background of fast urbanization and urban-rural dual structure in China, the research about sustainable livelihoods has important theoretical and practical meaning for solving the problem of poverty in rural areas and promoting the transformation of semi-urbanized farmers who live in city to urban residents. First, this paper reviewed the emergence and development history of sustainable livelihoods, and introduced current frameworks of sustainable livelihoods analysis. Second, this paper summarized the international research status quo from the aspects of both theory and practice, concluded the domestic research progress from four aspects including vulnerability context, livelihoods assets, policy and institution influencing process, livelihoods strategy and outcome. This study believed that the problems of current sustainable livelihoods research included: The theoretical system is incomplete and needs to be improved; research methods and technological means are not complete, which could obstruct research results; most researches focus on rather static assessment than dynamic forecast; researchers focus mainly on case study in rural areas, lacking in the semi-urbanized farmers in the urbanization process and macro level study. Finally, this paper suggested five key issues of future sustainable livelihoods research including the sustainable livelihoods research of a large number of semi-urbanized farmers in the urbanization process, sustainable livelihoods research at macro level, integrated study of both humanities and natural sciences, dynamic study based on new technological means, and sustainable livelihoods research in typical case areas.