Over the past 40 years, confection sunflower in China has achieved 4 cycles of significant improvements by growing local landraces selected by farmers, largescale cultivating openpollinated varieties (OPV) through conventional breeding, introduced foreign hybrids, and recently proprietary hybrids domestically developed. The area planted to sunflower in China is expected to remain at around 0.59 Mhm², which is mainly concentrated in 10 provinces of the north region with around threefourth of the production in Inner Mongolia, followed by Xinjiang. In term of sunflower production, over 95% is confection sunflower, which enabled China to become a leading producer of the confection sunflower worldwide. Confection sunflower is mostly used for leisue snack, besides seed yield, seed quality of sunflower (e.g. seed size, seed color, tasty flavor) continues to be the top priority of breeding programs. Moreover, in sunflower production areas, due to longterm continuous cultivation of sunflower without crop rotation, coevolution of disease pathogens, broomrape, and other biotic stresses with sunflower crops, plus, the limited genetic background of confection sunflower, varieties of damages caused by diseases, insects and weeds are getting worse. By summarizing of breeding history of Chinese confection sunflower, particularly international progress of diseaseresistant breeding in sunflower crops, this review would provide significant theoretical and technical supports on underlying resistance mechanisms and development of potential resistant varieties, to further enhance the highefficiency development of the confection sunflower industry.