Most existing vision-language pre-training methods focus on understanding tasks and use BERT-like loss functions (masked language modeling and image-text matching) during pre-training. Despite their good performance in the understanding of downstream tasks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and visual entailment, these methods cannot generate information. To tackle this problem, this study proposes unified multimodal pre-training for vision-language understanding and generation (UniVL). The proposed UniVL is capable of handling both understanding tasks and generation tasks. It expands existing pre-training paradigms and uses random masks and causal masks simultaneously, where causal masks are triangular masks that mask future tokens, and such pre-trained models can have autoregressive generation abilities. Moreover, several vision-language understanding tasks are turned into text generation tasks according to specifications, and the prompt-based method is employed for fine-tuning of different downstream tasks. The experiments show that there is a trade-off between understanding tasks and generation tasks when the same model is used, and a feasible way to improve both tasks is to use more data. The proposed UniVL framework attains comparable performance to recent vision-language pre-training methods in both understanding tasks and generation tasks. Moreover, the prompt-based generation method is more effective and even outperforms discriminative methods in few-shot scenarios.