At present, there are about 1500 sugarbeet germplasm resources preserved in China, which were first introduced from Holland and Germany in the early 20th century, and most of them were introduced after 1950s. After trial planting and improvement in different ecological areas of China, about 10% of them have been used as basic breeding materials, and a number of new varieties have been selected. At that time, due to the large number of newly-built sugar factories in China and the rapid expansion of beet planting area, seeds were urgently needed for production, so a large number of foreign seeds were applied to production on the basis of introduction and trial planting abroad. Such as the Soviet Union's P 1537, M2, P752, Poland's K.Bus, CLR, MLR, Udyez, AB, Aj 1, Hungary's Beta.c242/53 and other varieties. In the early 1960s, on the basis of improving foreign varieties and germplasm resources, the first batch of self-bred sugarbeet varieties in China were born, such as Hezuo No.2, Tianyan No.3, Fanyu 1 and Shuangfeng 1, all of which were diploid and multi-grain varieties. Since the 1970s, sugarbeet breeding has turned to heterosis utilization, and a number of varieties or strains of materials have been introduced from Germany, the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries, some of which have been used as cross parents or materials for backcrossing and chemical mutagenesis, and their genetic basis and economic characters have been significantly improved compared with the original parents, especially in the aspects of sugar content in root tuber, resistance to brown spot and root rot. According to preliminary statistics, so far there are more than 30 self-bred varieties in China, most of which have been popularized and applied in production. At present, the main varieties used are common polyploid hybrids, diploid hybrids and male sterile single-seed hybrids, and some of them are male sterile single-seed hybrids directly introduced from abroad or bred by Sino-foreign cooperation.

The genetic types of sugarbeet varieties in China have experienced a process of development and change. From the diploid polyploid variety in 1950s to 1960s, it developed into the common polyploid polyploid hybrid and male sterile polyploid polyploid hybrid in 1970s and 1980s. Since 1990s, it is a polyploid hybrid, and male sterile single polyploid (or diploid) hybrid and a few diploid polyploid varieties coexist. These varieties are bred by applying the principle of heterosis.