Rural environmental governance is a crucial part of implementing the rural revitalization strategy and an important path to realizing the modernization of China’ s environmental governance system. In this paper, the Citespace bibliometric analysis software is used to conduct a visual analysis and content interpretation of the core literature on rural environmental governance research in China. Based on the knowledge map drawn, the research characteristics, themes and trends of rural environmental governance research are clarified, and then specific paths to deepen the research on rural environmental governance in China are proposed. The analysis results show that the cooperation between authors and institutions in rural environmental governance research is not close enough. The core research themes are distributed across five dimensions: macro-institutional reform, micro-model update, urban-rural collaborative governance, effective participation of villagers, and cooperation among multiple subjects. Subsequent research should further optimize the research direction and innovate the research content. Studies should be carried out in many aspects, such as the construction of a rural environmental governance system from an overall perspective, comparative analysis and empirical investigation of rural environmental governance cases, consideration of interest factors in rural environmental governance, and exploration of judicial guarantee paths for rural environmental governance, so as to serve the practical progress of the reform of China’s rural environmental governance system.