As an essential component of China’s future national energy system, analyzing the technological innovation of hydrogen energy is important in promoting the green and low-carbon transformation of energy production and consumption. This paper combines the technology life cycle theory and the social network method to construct the IPC co-occurrence network of upstream, midstream and downstream in China’s hydrogen energy industry based on the patent data from 1985 to 2021, and analyzes the innovation entities, hot and core innovation fields. The results show that: (1) China’s hydrogen energy industry innovation is in a period of rapid growth, and is expected to enter the maturity period in 2028. (2) With the development evolution, the hydrogen energy industry has formed a technological innovation pattern dominated by enterprises and supplemented by universities and research institutions. (3) At different stages of development, there are big differences in the evolution of the hydrogen energy industry’s upstream, midstream, and downstream technical fields.