Based on the statistics of the paper on stars and stellar systems published in domestic and international journals, it is found that between 1981 and 2000, the progress of these two fields developed more rapidly in Chinese astronomical community than those in abroad, which reflected the fast progress in Chinese scientific researches after the reformation. Some branch fields in stars and stellar systems had made more significant progress based on their active research groups, such as supernovae and their remnants, interstellar media and star formation regions as well as stellar chemical abundance. The binary systems, which is one of the key fields in stellar systems, had synchronously with international progress, while the research on the Galaxy was relatively poorer in China. In these 20 years, the fraction of total number of the paper on stars and stellar systems published by Chinese astronomers was only 1.3% in the world, and it shows an obvious increasing in the recent 5 years with the fraction about 2.0%, which is still less than the fraction of international IAU members in China. Due to the development of deep-sky and high energy observing instruments, the progress in stellar research is relatively slowed down compared to the other fields in astronomy. Besides analyzing the field of stellar and stellar systems, we also need to analyze the other major branches in astronomy so that a feasible development plan can be made for Chinese astronomy in the future.