Since the appearance of Greenberg`s seminal work on word order typologies (1963), languages have been characterized in terms of his three sets of criteria, 1) the existence of prepositions as against postpositions; 2) the relative order of subject, verb, and object (VSO, SVO or SOV), and 3) the position of qualifying adjectives in relation to the noun. Based on these criteria, it has usually been assumed that Chinese is basically a SVO language and prepositional, which is similar to English. However, unlike Greenberg`s expectations and his proposed universals, it presents several exceptional properties, as follows : i) Chinese is prepositional as well as postpositional: ii) the governing noun follows the genitive; iii) the relative expression precedes the head noun; iv) in comparison of superiority, the order is standard-marker-adjective; and v) some adverbials are postverbal. These properties fit SOV languages, like Korean, which means that Chinese has perplexing word order properties. It can be summarized that Chinese can be seen as an SVO language, like English, but its many word order properties are similar to Korean, which is a SOV language. There are two explanations for these features of Chinese word order: intra-linguistic and extra-linguistic analyses. The first analysis assumes that Chinese is in the process of gradual change from being an SVO language to being an SOV language. The latter analysis presumes the language contact between Altaic languages and Chinese. In thes explanation, the language is sandwiched between Altaic languages and its original form, and is gradually Alticixed. In other words, it retains the properties of Altaic languages. What future studies need to perform in terms of Chinese word order typology is much broader and deeper analyses of these two possibilities.