Significance   High power fiber laser is one of the hot topics in the laser field, and fast development and significant milestones have been achieved in China recently. Although there have been plenty of review papers of high power fiber laser published, most of them focus on the scientific achievements. It is to be noted that, the discipline construction, which includes (but not limits to) education and training, basic and applied research, academic communication, practical application and so on, lays the foundation for the field of high power fiber laser.

  Progress  The development of discipline of high power fiber laser in China could be summarized into four stages. In the 1990s, the basic investigation on fiber laser was initiated. In the 2000s, high power fiber lasers based on double clad fiber dominates the field of high power fiber laser, and more than 1 kW output power was achieved by several independent groups. From 2010 to 2017, fast progress was made in the discipline of high power fiber laser, the layout of scientific research was optimized, and different research groups began to focus on key components, high performance fiber laser, fiber laser technology and system integration, respectively, and leading results in single frequency fiber laser, Raman fiber laser, fiber supercontinumm and coherent beam combining, were achieved. Since 2018, the discipline of high power fiber laser develops steadily, high power fiber laser with more than 20 kW output power and multimode fiber laser system with more than 100 kW were developed, which promotes the fast development of advanced manufacturing. However, there are still several challenges for the discipline of high power fiber laser in China. For example, as the most representative result of high power fiber laser, 10 kW single mode fiber laser was still under development, also, the performance lacks in the field of mid-infrared fiber laser and ultrafast fiber laser. In addition, it also lacks in original theoretical results such as transverse mode instability and multimode nonlinear fiber optics, the communication between the academic community and application community could be further enhanced.

  Conclusions and Prospects  Discipline of high power fiber laser in China has been developed in a fast and stable way in the past few decades, from the current state that includes scientific research, education, academic communication and application. It is suggested that, cooperation in multidiscipline, education, training and course material, and high-quality communication could be enhanced to ensure further development.