Carbon dot (or carbon quantum dot), a novel carbon nanomaterial which has effective absorption, colorful fluorescence in the UV-Vis region, has great prospect to be applied in biomedicine, environment energy, and catalysis. However, in the past decade, no matter the top-down and bottom-up methods, most of C-dots emitted in blue-orange light. Recently, with the development of nanotechnology, various approaches have been exploited to prepare red-emissive or near-infrared emissive C-dots. In this paper, we briefly summarized the various preparation methods of carbon dots and mainly summarized the new progress in preparation of red or near-infrared emissive C-dots.