With a contingent of 180,000 exploration geophysicists, China’s geophysical prospecting work occupies the forefront place in scale in the world and,as a result, large quantities of applied and research outcomes are being obtained every year. From cow oa, the Commission on Exploration Geophysics, Geological Society of China will write a review every year to report some major advances in exploration geophysics in the previous year,and this paper is the first one. It describes such subjects as aerogeophysics and oceanogeophysics, seism,geophysical logging and underground geophysics, ground electromagnetic method,*ground gravity and magnetic method, and ground gamma ennrgy spectra, and provides the number of field parties which were engaged in aerogeophysical and seismic exploration last year and the amount of work that was completed. Such data and some other statistical data are to be published every year.The paper also reports advances in techniques and applications of some major geophysical methods, but does not cover all the geophysical methods and their applications. Data show that seismic prospecting has been all along the most important geophysical method in China, whose significance is continuously increasing in other fields besides oil-gas exploration and whose techniques have made rapid progress. More and more importance is being attached to electromagnetic method by geophysicists in China. In the first part of this paper some present basic conditions of the exploration geophysical contingent are discussed with some statistical date given.