China has adopted a closed fuel cycle strategy, whereby spent fuels should be reprocessed. China has built and operated a reprocessing pilot facility and industrial demonstration facilities, and a large-scale commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant (800–1000 t/a) is still under planning. Due to regulatory restrictions, some of the spent fuel assemblies from NPPs are not permitted to be shipped to pilot or demonstration facilities for reprocessing, but are only allowed to be sent to commercial plants (which will be available over a decade later). For these “special” assemblies mentioned above, in the short-term (<5 years), on-site or near-site temporary dry storage facility should be put into operation as soon as possible to avoid reaching the capacity of the on-site pool. In the medium-term (5–10 years), the centralized dry storage center (national or regional) is proposed to improve the economics and safety of off-site storage of the special assemblies. In the long-term (dozen years later), special assemblies might be shipped to the large-scale commercial reprocessing plant. This paper analyzes the strategy of spent fuel off-site management and shipping mode of the special as well as general spent fuels in the short-, medium- and long-term stages, which can provide reference for the off-site storage of spent fuels.