Diarrhea is a common disease in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and dialectical treatment with TCM often achieves better result. Establishing animal models of TCM syndromes is of great significance to TCM research. Simple animal model establishment method are conducive to the development of TCM. At present, there is no uniformly recognized standard for establishing TCM syndrome models of diarrhea. The author of this article reviewed the method for generating animal models of diarrhea, including intestinal dampness-heat syndrome, cold-dampness trapping the spleen syndrome, stagnation of spleen and stomach syndrome, liver depression and spleen deficiency syndrome, spleen-qi deficiency syndrome and spleen-kidney yang deficiency syndrome, and found that the current approaches are unclear because of the random selection of modeling factors, subjective model evaluation criteria and other issues. This review provides suggestions for model improvement to establish industry-recognized, simple, efficient, scientific and stable diarrhea TCM syndrome models.