The paper explores life value assessment methods in China from both the historical and modern perspectives. The historical perspective includes the death penalty ransom approach and government pricing approach, while the modern perspective contains the human capital method and willingness-to-pay method. The human capital method measures the economic value created by people and uses it as their life assessment value, and the willingness-to-pay method evaluates peoples’ life value indirectly through the trade-off between the death risk and benefit. The paper then puts forward improvement ideas for the two modern life value assessment models and proposes possible future research directions, meanwhile providing a reference for such practical issues as compensation policymaking for industrial injuries or deaths for the sustainable development of emerging countries.