Abstract: Based on the measurements of short base line and levelling, this paper deals with the faulting characteristics before and after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, and three stages of the faulting process can be distinguished, i. e. preseismic accelerated creep stage, coseismic slip stage and postseismic adjusted stage.In the first stage, along the east-Cangzhou fracture zone the accelerated creep oc-curs earlier, and the amount of displacement is increasing with the distance from the epicenter, but it is decreasing along the direction from Ninghe to Zhangshanying northwest of Beijing and the creeping motion occurs later. The annual average rate of acceleration is several times up to an order of magnitude higher than that before it. The horizontal displacement is also several times up to an order of magnitude higher than the vertical. As for the direction of horizontal shear and the character of tension and compression, they are often in contrast to that before the acceleration.In the second stage, with the range (about 100km) on the two sides of the earthquake fault, the fracture slip is in quadrantal distribution, and the displacement amount is as large as several to more than ten mm.In the third stage, in addition to the displacements exponentially decrease with time nearby the epicenter, the distant field displacement can be divided into three types, i. e. the recovery, the gentle slope and the hysteresis recovery. In general, the adjusted displacements are rather larger, and some of them are even more than those in the accelerated stage prior to earthquake.Finally, the significance of the three stages mentioned above in earthquake prediction has been discussed herein.