This paper provides a critical review of the researches on hedges in the past 30 years in China. It briefly summarizes the current situation of the researches and claims that the hedge research has experienced two developmental stages: introductory and exploratory period and highspeed development one on the basis of the collected data of relevant research papers. It critically reviews the main researches in the past three decades from six perspectives: semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics, second language acquisition and translation studies. It discusses some concerning the methodology of the studies are discussed and some proposals for the future research are offered.