Background: At the end of 2019, the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) had severely damaging people’s life. China’s public health emergency management system had played an essential role in the handling and response of it, which had been appreciated by the World Health Organization and some countries. Hence it is necessary to make an overall analysis of the development of China’s health emergency management system. It can provide a reference for scholars to understand the current situation and look for new research points. Methods: We collected 2247 international from the Web of Science database, 959 Chinese articles from China National Knowledge Infrastructure database. Bibliometric and mapping knowledge domains analysis methods were used in this study for temporal distribution analysis, cooperation network, co-word network analysis. Results: The first international article in this field was published in 1991, while Chinese in 2005. Research institutions mainly come from universities and health institutions. Developed countries and European countries published more articles, while east of China published more. There are 52 burst words for international articles from 1999–2018, while 18 burst words for Chinese articles from 2003–2018. International top-ranked articles by citation appeared in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2016, while Chinese appeared in 2003, 2004, 2009, 2011.Conclusions: There are differences in the regional or economic distribution of international and Chinese cooperation networks. International research often relates to hot issues, mainly focus on the emergency preparedness and monitoring for public health events, while China’s focus on the public health emergency and their disposal. International begins the research with terrorism and bioterrorism, followed by disaster planning and emergency preparedness, epidemics and infectious diseases. China takes severe acute respiratory syndrome as the research background and legal system construction as the research starting point, followed by mechanism, structure, system, and learning from abroad of public health emergency management.