Ecotourism has been widely implemented in many underdeveloped countries, since ecotourism has the potential to realize the dual goal of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation. But ecotourism has become a hotly debated topic since its implementation in underdeveloped countries owing to the mismatch in vision and practice. Proponents of ecotourism considered that ecotourism development could alleviate local poverty by providing a large amount of employment opportunities for community households who were engaged in a variety of activities related to tourism. Critics thought that ecotourism in practice benefited neither conservation nor local communities because of a series of reasons. Thus based on widely reviewing related literature in foreign courtiers, the paper systematically analyzed the ecotourism impacts on livelihoods of indigenous communities. The research contents focused on economic impact, community participation, capacity building, socio-cultural impact, and public infrastructure. The results showed that the ecotourism impacts on rural livelihoods were uncertainty. Several factors, such as community ownership of natural resources, ecotourism revenues, famers' ability, linkage of local industry with tourism, effective management, would play a great role. Finally, three future research prospects, such as referring to Sustainable Livelihoods Approaches framework, dynamic assessment of ecotourism impacts and spatial analysis, political economy analysis of the relationship between ecotourism and community development, were put forward to promote ecotourism impact study and ecotourism development in China.