Since the reform and open-door policy, foreign financial institutions have increased quickly but unevenly in China. These foreign financial institutions play an important pole in furthering foreign investment and China's financial reform and economic development. This paper firstly analyses development process of foreign financial institutions in China, which can be classified as four different stages. Then the authors discuss the spatial disparity characteristics of foreign financial institutions in China from the view of regions and cities. It is shown that the eastern coastal regions in China have most foreign financial institutions, while the central and western areas have rare ones. In eastern regions, foreign financial institutions have highly concentrated on three regions:Yangtze River Delta, Zhujiang River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan triangle zone, which have 75.9% foreign banks and 84.1% foreign financial delegation offices of all country. From the view of cities, foreign financial institutions have mainly distributed in seven metropolis as follow:Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Dalian, Xiamen, which are also main financial center in China. Moreover, financial institutions from Japan and Korea are mainly located in the northern China and Hongkong's financial institutions are mostly located in the southern China, but financial institutions from America, France, England, German etc. are rather evenly distributed in northern area and southern area of China. Thirdly, the paper analyses the factors which affect the location choice of foreign financial institutions and proposes those leading factors including market size, policy-orienting, human resources, information spillovers, traditions and heritages and geographical approximation. At last, the paper predicts development trend of foreign financial institutions in China. With China's entrance to World Trade Organization and the strategy of the large-scale development of the western area, foreign financial institutions will extend toward the inner land but in the short stage present pattern will not change and foreign financial institutions will also gather in several major financial center in China.