Abstract: Buildings serve as the principal component of urban safety and the carrier of urban functions. With the development of economy, various kinds of buildings (e.g., public, commercial, etc.) have been built to satisfy the demands of social production, of human living, and so forth. The collapse of buildings initiated by earthquake disasters and accidental events will result in severe casualties, economic loss, and adverse social repercussions. In recent years, various collapse incidents have continued to occur, revealing numerous hidden dangers in the collapse resistance of existing buildings. Hence, more and more scholars start to pay attention to the collapse of building structures. Via theory, experiment, and numerical simulation, significant progress has been achieved in the area of collapse resistance of building structures. The impact and challenges of the Wenchuan earthquake on the research on structural resistance against earthquake-induced collapse and seismic design codes are first reviewed. The development of structural anti-collapse design is teased out, and the inspiration and impact of recent collapse events and extreme earthquakes on existing design methods and theory are discussed. A literature review is thusly conducted to discuss the development and key scientific issues in the field of anti-collapse research. Current status of structural anti-collapse research is summarized from the following aspects, including building collapse computation models, design theory, anti-collapse performance requirements/acceptance levels, collapse research on different types of buildings, and building codes for anti-collapse design. Summarized are future directions for the development of anti-collapse research and engineering practices, including the evolution of anti-collapse design theory for new structures, the innovation in computational models, the development of collapse models under complex loads, and the refinement of standards and specifications.