Abstract: Understory economy is a key path to coordinate ecological protection and economic development, which is of great significance in accelerating the process of global carbon neutrality and deeply promoting rural revitalization and high-quality forestry development. In order to explore the current status, hot spots and frontiers in the field of understory economy research in China, relevant literature related to understory economy from 2000 to 2024 downloaded from the core database of CNKI were used as research objects, and CiteSpace visual analysis software and CNKI's own analysis tools were used. From the perspective of annual publication number and trend, important journal sources and authors, keyword co-occurrence, time zone graph, the visual analysis was carried out in order to provide theoretical basis for the development of understory economy. The results showed that the field of China’s understory economy had attracted the attention of domestic researchers since 2006, and the highest number of published papers in 2024 was 68. The research in the field of understory economy mainly focused on the key words of state-owned forest area, medicinal plants, influencing factors, countermeasures, development model and so on. The research trend extended to rural revitalization, digitalization, technology model, understory vegetation, and stand transformation over time. On the whole, China has paid more and more attention to the field of understory economy and the research content is gradually enriched. This field focuses more on the research of the driving mechanism and model of understory economy, and the multi-angle exploration of medicinal plants, industrial transformation and rural revitalization is the research frontier of understory economy.