Abstract: Rice is one of the most important food crops in China, and illumination has an important effect on its yield and quality. With the deterioration of the global climate, the low light stress brought by the frequent rainy weather has become an important limiting factor affecting the high and stable yield and high-quality production of rice. The safe, stable and sustainable development of rice is of great significance to ensure food security and satisfy people's demand for food. Therefore, this paper summarizes the research results in recent years. The effects of low light stress on morphological characteristics, physiological and biochemical characteristics, yield and quality of rice were reviewed. This paper analyzes the response mechanism of rice suffer low light stress. It mainly includes morphological (root, stem and leaf), physiology (photosynthetic traits, Photoreceptor mediated signal transduction, carbon isotope discrimination), biochemistry (osmotic adjustment, antioxidant system and hormone regulation) and molecular level (shade tolerance gene expression). The future study on shade tolerance of rice was also prospected. The aim of this study is to provide a reference for understanding the molecular response mechanism of shade tolerance in rice and breeding shade tolerance varieties.