The present invention provides a method, an apparatus, and a system for setting up a bidirectional point-to-multipoint label switched path. The method includes: distributing a leaf node label of a leaf-to-source data path and a source node label of a source-to-leaf data path through a Path message and a Resource Reservation message by using a Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering to set up a bidirectional point-to-multipoint label switched path. The bidirectional point-to-multipoint label switched path that is set up in the present invention ensures consistency of LSPs in both directions, and overcomes a defect that the source node needs to send multiple data packets to the leaf nodes through multiple bidirectional point-to-multipoint label switched paths when a source transmits data to a leaf in the prior art.