Abstract: China’s economy has shifted to a stage of high-quality development, facing new opportunities and challenges. Existing development theories are unable to respond to contemporary Chinese issues, and new theoretical guidance is urgently needed for the new development stage. It is timely to promote theoretical innovation in development economics based on China’s practice. Since the 1840s, generations of Chinese scholars have made significant contributions to the emergence and development of development economics. Since the reform and opening up, China has formed a unique development path through a lot of practices and accumulated rich experience in economic development, which has laid a solid foundation for the innovative development of development economics. To promote theoretical innovation in development economics in the future, on the one hand, we should pay attention to the summary and refinement of China’s development practices and develop them into a systematic economic theory; on the other hand, we should transform and innovate the existing theoretical framework and paradigm based on China’s practices, so as to provide theoretical guidance for China to achieve high-quality economic development, and provide policy reference and models for solving the world’s economic development problems.