In recent years, countries around the world have intensified efforts to ban and restrict disposable plastic products that are not easy to recycle and pollution-prone, while biodegradable plastics have become the best choice for their alternative products. Biodegradable plastics are divided into biobased and petrochemical based biodegradable plastics. The former is subdivided into total starch biodegradable plastics (total starch biodegradable plastics, microbial fermentation and chemical synthetic natural polymer biodegradable plastics, microbial synthetic biodegradable plastics, mixed biodegradable plastics) and incomplete biodegradable plastics according to processing approaches. The latter adopts coal or oil and other fossil fuels as raw materials, using the method of chemical synthesis of monomer polymerization, such as polybutylinic acid butylinediol ester (PBS), polybutylene adipate terephthalate (PBAT), poly propylene carbonate (PPC), which are based on aliphatic polyester, while the ester structure on the molecular chain determines they are susceptible to microorganisms or enzymes. All these biodegradable plastics are introduced on processing, performance characteristics, applications, as well as the global, including foreign and Chinese production capacity status. In the future, China should focus on the development of starch, PLA, PBAT biodegradable plastics and pay attention to the research of polymer design method.