In the global changing era, it is essential to analyze the future trend of agricultural development in China and forecast the target, direction, and path of China’s agricultural modernization toward 2050 in order to provide support for policy making. In this paper, we first investigate agricultural development in the past four decades and then analyze the opportunities and challenges to be faced. Finally, we forecast the future agricultural development in China. Our study shows that China’s agriculture has experienced a rapid growth for the past four decades, underlying which technology progress, institutional innovation, marketization reform, and public investment are attributed as the four major driving forces. Looking forward to the future, agricultural development in China still encounters a lot of challenges including slowdown in productivity growth, degradation in soil and water, and uncertainty of the global supply chain. This implies that, toward 2050, China should stick to the principles of innovation, green, high efficiency, and sustaintability, and accelerate agricultural modernization through efficiently producing more high-valued and green products, so as to maintain domestic food security and self-sustained agricultural supply. To achieve the long-term goal, the government should develop seven major strategies with a focus on biological technology and seedling innovation, and initiate a series of agriculture-supportive policies such as prioritized development of agriculture, innovative land reforms, farmers training, high-value agriculture support, and global agricultural trade management.