The invention provides a reconfigurable intelligent surface assisted multi-user MIMO uplink transmission method. According to the transmission method, a signal sent by a user side is reflected to a base station through an RIS, and the RIS can change the phase of the signal incident on the RIS. Aiming at a bottleneck problem of channel information acquisition of an RIS-assisted multi-user MIMO transmission system, only partial channel state information is utilized, including instantaneous channel state information from the RIS to a base station channel and statistical channel state informationfrom a user to the RIS channel; through an alternate optimization method, a deterministic equivalence principle, a block coordinate descent method, an MM method and the like, a sending covariance matrix and an RIS phase shift matrix of a user are jointly designed to maximize the global energy efficiency of the system or traverse the spectral efficiency; when the channel state information is changed, the user side dynamically implements transmission power distribution with maximum energy or spectral efficiency, and the RIS dynamically adjusts the phase shift matrix. According to the invention,the implementation complexity is low, and the performance of multi-user MIMO uplink transmission can be effectively improved.