Rice (Oryza sativa L.) chalkiness, including percentage of grains with chalkiness and chalkiness degree, and an important appearance quality, affects many other quality traits. It’s essential to illustrate its genetic basis. With the development of functional genomics and molecular marker technology in last decades, researchers mapped many QTLs controlling chalkiness; some of them have been fine mapped already. This paper reviews evaluation index of rice chalkiness, correlation between it and other quality characters, genetic basis and QTL mapping of chalkiness, chalkiness gene cloning, and proposed molecular strategy of improving chalkiness by recurrent selection using dominant genic malesterility line combined with marker assisted selection. Our results will provide useful information for rice chalkiness improvement.