Despite recent emerging research attention, 3D hand pose estimation still suffers from the problems of predicting inaccurate or invalid poses which conflict with physical and kinematic constraints. To address these problems, we propose a novel 3D hand pose estimation adversarial network (PEAN) which can implicitly utilize such constraints to regularize the prediction in an adversarial learning framework. PEAN contains two parts: a 3D hierarchical estimation network (3DHNet) to predict hand pose, which decouples the task into multiple subtasks with a hierarchical structure; a pose discrimination network (PDNet) to judge the reasonableness of the estimated 3D hand pose, which back-propagates the constraints to the estimation network. During the adversarial learning process, PDNet is expected to distinguish the estimated 3D hand pose and the ground truth, while 3DHNet is expected to estimate more valid pose to confuse PDNet. In this way, 3DHNet is capable of generating 3D poses with accurate positions and adaptively adjusting the invalid poses without additional prior knowledge. Experiments show that the proposed 3DHNet does a good job in predicting hand poses, and introducing PDNet to 3DHNet does further improve the accuracy and reasonableness of the predicted results. As a result, the proposed PEAN achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three public hand pose estimation datasets.