The seed industry is a strategic and foundational core industry for the nation, with seeds serving as the basis for constructing a modern seed industry system. As a core mechanism in China's variety management, the variety approval system has undergone years of reform and improvement, significantly promoting the healthy development of the seed industry and ensuring the effective supply of major agricultural products such as grain. However, the current variety approval system faces numerous challenges in practice, with Chinese seed industry still grappling with issues of insufficient innovation and uneven development. Therefore, this study summarized the history and outcomes of the reforms in Chinese variety approval system and conducted a comparative analysis of the variety approval systems in developed countries such as the United States, the European Union, and Japan. Based on this comparison, the study has drawn on the experiences of these countries to propose the following recommendations for further improving Chinese variety approval system, enhancing the remedy system within variety approval, optimizing variety approval standards and trial designs, strengthening the effective linkage between variety approval and variety protection, and gradually transitioning from a variety approval system to a variety registration system.