Abstract: Tea is an important economic and beverage crop in China. The tea plant (Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) is self-incompatible, long-term allogamy contributes to high heterogeneity. It takes a long time for the successful breeding of a new tea cultivar. It is very important to improve the efficiency of early appraisal of individual selection and the evaluation accuracy of target traits in the breeding procedure. Association analysis was a new approach of studying the relationship of molecular markers and/or candidate genes with target phenotypic traits. It was widely used to in allelic gene mining, functional gene appraisal, generation and application of functional markers in plant breeding, which also might be a new promising approach for the breeding of tea plant. In this paper, the basic statistic principles, strategies, characteristics and current successful applications of association analysis in plants were reviewed. Finally, we also discussed the potential application of association analysis in the marker assisted selection of tea breeding.