China has completed the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects. The new stage of development puts forward higher requirements for rural ecological and environmental protection and governance, and rural ecological revitalization should not only improve the quality of the ecological environment, but also promote the common prosperity of farmers and rural areas. In the needs of the development of the times, the research results of rural ecology are constantly rich and the concept connotation is constantly expanding. It is necessary to sort out and summarize the research of Chinese rural ecology in the past 20 years to provide a theoretical basis for the construction of beautiful countryside, the protection of natural resources and the sustainable rural development. This paper presented a bibliometric and visual analysis of rural ecology studies in China. By mapping the visual knowledge map, combing out the development of rural ecology research in China over the past 20 years, the rural ecology study was divided into three stages:the first phase was in 2001-2006, rural ecological research favored the structure, process and function of farmland or rural ecosystem, and the targeted rural ecological tourism; the second phase was in 2006-2013, the rural ecological research tended to be comprehensive, it was reflected in the village planning, sustainable development and ecological civilization; the third phase was in 2013-2020, rural ecology paid attention to rural landscape construction, beautiful rural construction and rural revitalization, this stage was not only a period of comprehensive and systematic study of rural ecology, also was a stage of rural ecological construction growth from quantity to the improvement of rural ecological quality. We emphasized that the increasing demand for the rural ecological-living environment drove the continuous development of rural ecology, and proposed that human perception and social needs were the main driving forces to promote the development of rural ecological research. Aiming at the rural ecological hot spots, we introduced the research trends in four aspects, including the fine management and early warning of the rural ecological environment, the ecological environment policies and systems in the rural construction, the rural landscape planning and the rural ecological culture construction, and the green development and sustainability of the rural production and living consumption. Finally, focusing on the demand hierarchy theory and rural ecosystem services, the research constructed the basic framework of rural ecology research of "demand-ecosystem service-well-being" and "element-settlement-landscape" mode, and emphasized that on the basis of interdisciplinary research and according to the multi-level and multi-scale characteristics of rural ecology research, the further research should be focused on the social, economic study on the comprehensive effect of ecological multi factors on rural ecosystem and their interactions.