By reviewing the history of modernization that China' s information business has gone through since 70’s it is no wonder to find the great role thesauruses have played.As the product of thesaurus compiling,the thesaurus has provided languages for computer information retrieval,and the effort itself has mobilized everyone in this field,and promoted the process of China' s information business modernization.Through more than one decade of practice,however , it has been found that the thesaurus has many weak points, such as the great difficulty and effort needed for its maintenance, indexing discrepancy, and unsatisfactory retrieval efficiency, The author con-siders that it would be a wise decision to allow the thesaurus to retire backstage and adopt full-text indexing with post-controlled vocabulary , with regard to the abundance of computer re-sources we already have and the requirements of user f riendliness to be met.