Abstract: Against the backdrop of ongoing global modernization and the profound restructuring of urban-rural relations, rural modernization has become a critical issue for achieving sustainable development worldwide. Drawing on a global perspective and China’s local practice, this paper systematically elucidates the theoretical connotations, evolutionary trajectories, and practical paradigms of rural modernization. The research finds that rural modernization worldwide is not a single linear process of convergence; but rather a diversified development path characterized by market-led, planning-oriented, culture-driven, and constraint-adaptive models, influenced by varying resource endowments, institutional environments, and development stages. Despite their differences, these pathways share common features, including increased farmer specialization and organization, simultaneous strengthening of intensive farmland use and ecological constraints, and the expansion of agricultural functions from single-production to multi-value creation. Addressing the Chinese context, the study develops an integrative theoretical framework that takes “the modernization of the people” as its value origin, the coupling of three core elements people-land-industry as its analytical axis, and the five-dimensional system comprising industry, society, culture, ecology, and governance as its functional objective architecture. Based on empirical analyses of the dynamics of China’s rural population, adjustments in agricultural land use, and the transformation of the agricultural industry, this paper points out that the prominent issues such as insufficient vitality of stakeholders, imbalanced allocation of resources, and relatively low industrial efficiency remain prevalent in the current process of China’s rural modernization. The research indicates that high-quality development in rural China cannot be achieved by simply transplanting any single foreign model. Instead, it requires the construction of an endogenous and synergistic development mechanism, centered on reshaping industrial foundations through technological innovation, activating the factor potential by institutional reform, and expanding the system’s boundaries via urban-rural integration. This exploration not only consolidates the rural foundation for Chinese-style modernization but also offers Chinese experience and a new rural development paradigm for global rural transformation, particularly for late-modernizing countries, balancing efficiency and equity, and coordinating national strategies with community resilience.