22 SSRs covered the entire maize genome were selected to fingerprint a set of 180 maize inbred lines preserved in Institute of Crop Germplasm Resources, Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Totally, 129 alleles were detected by these 22 SSRs, averaged 5.9 per locus, ranging from 2 to 13. The average gene diversity (He) was 0.583, and the overall PIC across all these SSRs was 0.528. Model-based clustering analysis indicated that all these 180 inbreds could be seperated into 5 distinct groups, agreed well with the heterotic groups of Chinese maize inbreds. Results from the F-statistics and the analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) showed that the genetic differentiation coefficient among model-based groups varied from 0.021 to 0.079, and the overall genetic variation among these groups only accounted for 3.38%, the rest (96.62%) was observed existing within these groups.