The implementation of the International Decade for Natrual Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) leads some of the government departments and disaster management institutions changed their disaster reduction research emphases to vulnerability and resilience, and there occurs a new upsurge in the vulnerability and resilience research among the foreign and domestic scholars. Since the 1970s the concept of resilience has also been used in a more metaphorical sense to describe ecosystems that undergo stress and have the ability to recover and return to their original state. The concept of resilience is now a common study object in a great variety of interdisciplinary work concerned with the interactions between people and nature, including ecology, disaster and environment change. The overview of the conceptual development of disaster resilience shows that what was once a concept used only to describe the ability to recover from external shocks is now a comprehensive concept related to many system functions before, during and after disasters, including learning, adaptation, adjustment, recovery and so on. But at present, the disaster resilience research is still at a conceptual research stage, there are no common-accepted operational definition or well-developed assessment models. This paper concludes the conceptual development and recent research status quo of resilience comprehensively and points out the scientific value and significance to do research on disaster resilience, then analyzes the relationship between disaster resilience and vulnerability and the assessment difficulties. At last, some main research issues and key questions to be solved in future is discussed.