Abstract: China has the largest population and is also the largest agro-based country in the world. As such, agricultural modernization is critical for national modernization. To this end, food security should be the ultimate goal of agricultural modernization in China. Based on China’s modernization development progress, the importance ranking of agricultural modernization in national modernization has been determined by food security at different historical stages. With small population in the 1950s, there was not big problem for food supply. Thus agricultural modernization was ranked the second among the four modernization types. Then with the acute shortage and huge demand for food in “Three Years of Natural Disasters” in the 1960s, agricultural modernization was ranked first among the four modernization types. At the beginning of the 21^st century, China was completely self-sufficient in food and even slight surpluses. Then, agricultural modernization did not appear in the five modernization types documented in the 17^th National Congress Report of the Communist Party of China (CPC). But by 2012, food import rapidly increased along with increasing population in China. Then, agricultural modernization ranked the fourth in the four modernization types in the 18^th National Congress Report of CPC. Food security ranked the first in 2014 because of the large amount of food import in recent years. Because of the huge population, weak foundation of agricultural modernization, resource and environment conflicts, food security was strongly emphasized in China. It was stressed that ensuring food security was China’s internal issue. Agricultural modernization was identified as China’s long-term mission. At present and also in the future, it was proposed to continuously increase food security via agricultural mechanization, high water use efficiency and biotechnology-based agriculture in China. This was concluded to maintain sustainable development of agricultural modernization and to realize the ultimate goal of food security in China.