In order to keep a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the progress of Chinese character recognition, the literature data of Chinese character recognition in Web of Science database are selected and knowledge mapping analysis is made by CiteSpace visualization software. The research results show that Chinese universities and research institutes are the core force of Chinese character recognition. The development of Chinese character recognition technology has evolved from the early traditional OCR technology to the online handwritten Chinese character recognition in the middle period, and then to the deep learning in recent research of Chinese character recognition . The research frontiers topics are handwritten Chinese character recognition, hybrid language model, generative adversarial networks and scene text recognition. Chinese character recognition technology will develop towards high efficiency and intelligence.