China is the largest freshwater pearl producer in the world. The development of pearl culture and seed industry may be divided into four stages. In this review, the major progress in different development stages of pearl culture and seed industry was characterized respectively. In the first development stage, the pearl culture industry expanded rapidly, and the freshwater pearl mussel resources were damaged seriously due to overfishing natural mussels for pearl culture. In the second development stage, the artificial breeding of freshwater pearl mussel was successful, and Hyriopsis cumingii and Cristaria plicata were selected as the best two species for pearl production. In this stage, the freshwater pearl yield in China got up to the first place in the world. In the third development stage, the pearl culture and seed industry were commercialized step by step due to the rapid development of private pearl enterprises. The freshwater pearl yield reached the highest level in this stage. Since 2008, the freshwater pearl industry has entered the period of transformation and upgrading from persuit of high pearl yield to persuit of high pearl quality. At present, offspring seed scale production has been promoted continuously, however, the seed produced by separate farmer still holds higher proportion. The degree of industrialization in seed production is low. For germplasm creation and application in freshwater pearl mussel, evaluation of germplasm, hybrid breeding and selection breeding are carried out gradually. However, a few modern breeding technologies are applied in pearl mussel breeding and the conversion rate of scientific and technological achievements is low. Finally, according to the requirement of constructing modern aquaculture seed industry, we looked to the future of the modern, commercial and diversified freshwater pearl seed industry in China, and gave some advices. The review is beneficial to developing freshwater pearl mussel seed industry and even pearl industry.