Conventional lung surgery requires a 20CM chest wall incision, which is highly invasive and painful after surgery, often lasting six months to two years. Minimally invasive surgery includes muscle-preserving open-heart surgery and thoracoscopic surgery. Thoracoscopic surgery includes both thoracoscopic-assisted small incisions and pure thoracoscopic surgery. In particular, pure thoracoscopic surgery is the least invasive and has the least postoperative pain. Thoracoscopic surgery began in the early 1990s and was first applied to simple surgeries such as biopsy of pleural diseases, surgical treatment of spontaneous pneumothorax and biopsy of unexplained lung lesions. Through the efforts of the past 20 years, more complicated surgeries such as lobectomy can also be done thoracoscopically. Thoracoscopic surgery in China has developed almost simultaneously with the rest of the world, and I was fortunate to be one of the first thoracic surgeons trained to perform thoracoscopic surgery in China. We currently perform thoracoscopic surgery including pneumothoracic surgery, benign tumors of the pleura or lung, bronchiectasis, chronic lung abscess, etc. We also perform radical lung cancer surgery and lymph node dissection for some peripheral type early lung cancers with tumors smaller than 5CM. Our pure thoracoscopic surgery uses two 1CM incisions and a 3-5CM secondary incision depending on the size of the lesion. The surgery is performed entirely under a TV monitor without the use of rib spacers that may cause intercostal nerve damage, and the surgical specimen is placed in a specimen bag and removed through the secondary incision. Thoracoscopic surgery is less invasive, with less bleeding, faster recovery and less postoperative pain. However, it is technically demanding and not every patient is suitable or every thoracic surgeon can perform it successfully.