With the development of network and information technologies, information security is more and more widely researched in China. To know where the work is and where it goes, we focus on comprehensively surveying the twenty years of important fundamental research by Chinese scholars, and giving, from our point of view, the significance as well as the outlook of future work. Some of the reviewed work, including the researches on fundamental theory of cryptography, cryptographic algorithm, security protocol, security infrastructure and information hiding, greatly advances the related sub-fields, and is highly recognized in and outside of China. Nevertheless, the overall work, we think, is still facing the problems of unbalanced development of sub-areas, limited scope of research, lack of systematic work and application, etc., leaving much room for improvement in the near future.