Cadmium sulfide semiconductor has appropriate energy band position and strong visible light absorption. It can be used as a catalyst in photocatalytic reaction. It is further synthesized with ethylenediamine by hydrothermal method with chromium chloride and copper reagent as raw materials. Under light conditions(λ> 420 nm), the hydrogen production performance was 57.38 μmol·g-1h-1 and showed excellent stability through cyclic experiment.The cadmium sulfide catalyst was characterized by XRD, SEM, XPS, UV-vis and BET. The experimental results showed that the structure of cadmium sulfide was hexagonal crystal structure, the morphology was one-dimensional nanostructure with uniform distribution, the band gap was 2.28 eV, and the specific surface area and porosity were large. Therefore, cadmium sulfide can be used in photocatalytic hydrogen production experiment.