There is a large gap between photovoltaic (PV) demand and PV supply in China. For a long time, more than 90% of the PV cells were exported to other countries, mainly to European and US region. But in 2012, US government decided to impose high tariffs on solar modules from China, then European Commission will announce their tariffs in 2013. In this context, we discussed the question on how the supply in China will be driven by demand in the following years by analyzing the driving forces for domestic demand in past 10 years, the structure and status of PV supply chain in China, and the future domestic demand to 2020. The point made by this study is that about half of current capacity in China will survive to next wave of strong demand. But the premise is that Chinese government should make more efforts to clear technical and nontechnical barriers for grid connection. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.