The potential vegetation, as a final state of succession which achieves the balance with its site,is the most stable and mature climax vegetation type at the site without human interference, and is the trend of the regional vegetation development. The study of potential vegetation can substantially reveal the impact of climate on the changes of the vegetation patterns. It is the starting point of the vegetation-environmental classification and relationship study, as well as the key point of the global change and terrestrial ecosystem study. Based on the methodology of integrated sequence classification and the support of GIS methods, this paper analyzed meteorological data (＞0℃ annual cumulative temperature and precipitation ) from 2,348 stations from 1961 to 1990, and classified the potential vegetation categories in China. The classification results show that: (1) There are 41 potential vegetation categories in China, which shows the diversity of potential vegetation in China. Comparatively, the distribution of China′s potential vegetation is rather uneven in light of the different size that the potential vegetation covers; the largest one, which is the frigid perhumid rain tundra, alpine meadow, covers 1526188 km2, and the smallest one, which is the tropical-semiarid savanna, only covers 13 km2. (2) The main altitude limits of the potential vegetation in China is between 0～6800m. Within this range, with the increase of the altitude the vegetation diversity decline significantly. (3)The spatial distribution of China’s potential vegetation reflects the three zonality very well, which is latitude zonality, longitude zonality and the vertical zonality. These three zonalities are mainly caused by the variation of the radiation along the change of latitude, changes of the humidity with the change of distances from the sea, and changes of the heat and humidity caused by the change of height respectively. (4) China′s potential vegetation shows two main characteristics in the distribution of gravity center, which are space gathering（P1,P2,P3,P4,P5,P6）and space linear adjacency（L1,L2,L3）.