The many studies that have been conducted to determine the spillover effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China have not reached consistent conclusion. To investigate the factors such as variable selection and estimation methods that caused the inconsistent findings regarding the FDI spillover effects in different research papers, this research presents a meta-analysis of estimates collected from 150 previous studies relevant to the FDI spillover effect in China, comprising 536 observations from 89 Chinese papers, 53 English papers, and 8 Korean papers. The results of t-test and regression analysis showed that the variables used play an important role in measuring the FDI spillover effect, especially the spillover effect measure variables and the data characteristic variables, which significantly influence the direction and extent of the FDI spillover effect. In addition, a publication bias test revealed a bias between English and non-English (Chinese and Korea) papers, which was attributed to the different standpoints of paper authors and the publication preference of academic journals.