Abstract: Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Party and the state have made major deployments to ensure the development of postgraduate grant policy, which has undergone four stages of development. By using the historical institutionalism analysis method, this paper makes an analysis of the change of China's postgraduate grant policy, and finds that the deep structure affecting the development of China's postgraduate grant policy is the guidance of educational philosophy, the guidance of government behavior and the autonomous promotion of universities; And the path dependence in the policy change is the result of the transformation cost of system operation, the learning effect, the coordination effect and the adaptability expectation; And the dynamic mechanism of the change of postgraduate grant policy lies in the game equilibrium among the government, universities and postgraduates.