Abstract: With the popularization of health awareness and the progress of gastroscopy, the proportion of early gastric cancer is increasing year by year in China. Early gastric cancer has a good prognosis and long‑term survival time. Improving postoperative life quality of patients with early gastric cancer will become one of the key directions of gastric cancer research. Therefore, on the premise of ensuring radical tumor treatment, function-preserving gastrectomy for the purpose of improving patients′ quality of life has become a hot topic in early gastric cancer. In recent years, with the deep study on the rule of lymph node metastasis in gastric cancer, the application extent of function-preserving gastrectomy has gradually expanded to advanced gastric cancer. Function-pre-serving gastrectomy includes segmental gastrectomy, proximal gastrectomy and local gastrectomy. The authors summarize important research progress of function-preserving gastrectomy at home and abroad and their own practical experience in recent years, aiming to provide references for clinical surgeons to carry out function-preserving gastrectomy.