Abstract: It is a focal issue in the literature to explore the general rule of industrial structure evolution. Although many researchers pay attention to the studies on industrial structure, there are two deficiencies, namely, one is the classification of industrial structure is too rough, another is the data required by forecasting model doesn’t match the real world. Therefore, the evolution of Chinese manufacturing industrial structure from 1988 to 2005 is depicted. It is revealed that Chinese manufacturing industrial structure is on the trend of upgrading all the time. Besides, a new forecasting model - support vector machine is proposed based on a differential evolution algorithm - to forecast Chinese manufacturing industrial structure. This model is tested as a good forecasting model; it effectively solves the problem that the econometrics forecasting model of industrial structure is difficult to be established.