The ground beetle, Chlaenius pallipes, belonging to the genus Chlaeniu (Coleoptera: Carabidae), is widely distributed in East Asia and overwinters as adults. It is highly abundant in northern China and plays an important role in agriculture and forest pest control. To understand the population genetic differentiation and demographic history of C. pallipes from the Tsinling Mountains, a 1,602 bp fragment of mitochondrial DNA (Cox1-tRNALeu-Cox2) was sequenced for 151 individuals from 13 geographical populations from Gansu, Shaanxi, and Henan provinces. Fifty-seven polymorphic sites were identified, of which 45 are parsimony informative, 11 singleton variable sites, and a 1 bp insertion. These polymorphic sites defined 65 haplotypes, among which 17 were common and 48 were private with relatively lower frequencies. The haplotype diversity (H_d= 0.972) was hight but the nucleotide diversity was low (P_i= 0.0025). The topologies of the phylogenetic trees obtained based on maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian inference were similar. Both ML tree and Bayesian inference tree revealed two clades (a and b) from node d on the trees. In the haplotype network, a five median vector was employed and several loops were constructed and"star phylogeny"patterns were present. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) suggested that most of the variation was due to within-population differences (92.10%), while differences among populations only contributed 7.90% of the total. The among-population F_ST value was 0.07897 (P < 0.01). Consequently, we conclude that there is obvious genetic differentiation in the C. pallipes populations we investigated. For the spatial analysis of molecular variance (SAMOVA), increasing K values from 2 to 12 were selected; the F_CT values were fairly low and fluctuated. Thus, the SAMOVA tests failed to reveal any meaningful phylogeographic structure. Furthermore, the results of the PERMUT analysis did not suggest any phylogeographic structure of the populations sampled based on the mtDNA haplotype data, as total N_ST(0.114) was not significantly higher than G_ST(0.101; P > 0.05). The results of the neutrality tests on the total indicated that both the Tajima's D and Fu's F_S were negative values, and the tests for the values are highly significant (P < 0.01), suggesting demographic expansion. Mismatch distribution analysis revealed a unimodal frequency distribution of pairwise difference in the total population and in each haplogroup. Both the neutrality tests and mismatch distribution analysis suggested that this species has undergone a demographic expansion. Furthermore,we used the Bayesian Skyline Plot (BSP) approach to estimated the demographic history of C. pallipes under BEAST 1.4.7. The demographic expansion time was identified as being between 0.100 Ma to 0.025 Ma. We found evidence of constant population size before the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, between 0.020 and 0.018 Ma) developed in the Tsinling Mountains. Consequently, we suggest that LGM had little effect on the demographic dynamics of C. pallipes.