Abstract: Urban shrinkage in China has become increasingly visible and is accelerating, making shrinking-city research a frontier topic across urban and rural planning, geography, economics and management. This paper reviews Chinese scholarship over the past decade (2015-2024) to clarify directions and pathways for future research. It maps the field through three types of work, international experience, domestic empirical studies and theoretical discussion, and through three analytical levels, representations and causes, problems and mechanisms, and responses and pathways. On this basis, it summarizes major research progress and identifies two future orientations: deepening comparative research on international experience and its local translation, and advancing micro-level diagnosis and governance responses in domestic empirical research. The paper further proposes five key agendas: vacancy response, facility optimization, social equity, regional governance and planning transformation.