Most of the existing research on tourism big data in China has focused on identifying and analyzing specific problems in the tourism industry and lacks a critical evaluation of contemporary, state-of-the-art studies on big data in tourism. This paper examines empirical studies of big data in tourism that have been published in the Chinese language, reviewing 358 journal papers published in prestigious Chinese academic publications on tourism as of January 2021. In these studies, three types of big data are used: UGC data, device data, and transaction data. Under each data type, in-depth investigations of the study’s goals, data features, and analytical approaches are undertaken. While tourism big data research in China has taken significant strides in study topics, data collection, and analytic methods, the distribution of research on various forms of data is as yet uneven. There is, therefore, room for improvement in study topics, data collection methods, and analysis approaches.