Recent experimental results from the HL-1M tokamak and progress in the HL-2A project are presented in this paper. In HL-1M, strong fishbone instability was observed during off-axis electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH). This is the first observation of fishbone instability purely driven by energetic electrons produced by ECRH. The molecular beam injection (MBI) was first proposed and demonstrated in HL-1M. Recently, new results of the MBI experiment were obtained by increasing the pressure of the gas. A stair-shaped density increment was obtained with high-pressure multi-pulse MBI just like the density evolution behaviour during multi-pellet injection. It is shown that injected particles penetrated into the core region of the plasma. HL-2A is a divertor tokamak constructed at SWIP based on the original ASDEX main components. The mission of the HL-2A project is to explore the physics issues involved in an advanced tokamak. For the first phase, divertor (edge plasma) and confinement research will be emphasized. The major parameters of HL-2A are R = 1.65 m, a = 0.4 m, Bt = 2.8 T, IP = 0.48 MA. The main parameters and characteristics of the subsystems such as power supply, pumping, diagnostics and auxiliary heating are presented in this paper. The first plasma of HL-2A was obtained at the end of 2002.