Water, nutrients, gas and heat are the four main factors in soil to ensure soil fertility. Traditional irrigation management often ignores the importance of soil aeration. Hypoxia stress is often attributed to soil compaction, high ground water table or unreasonable irrigation. Under hypoxia stress, plants declined in aerobic respiration with part plant root dying, and leaves atrophying, thus leading to a low water and nutrient use efficiency. As an integrated index of soil permeability and status of soil oxygen, soil aeration represents one of the overall properties of soil fertility, which reflects the relationships between soil biological oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production and gas exchange between soil and atmosphere. Insufficient soil aeration would surely disturb the balance between the four factors of soil fertility, making the soil deteriorating in soil physical and chemical properties, which in turn negatively affect crop growth and yield. Irrigation displaces air in soil pores with water, causing temporal hypoxia, which may be localized and last a long time, particularly in heavy clay soils, where a wetting front is maintained due to frequent pulsing irrigation events. A system, termed oxygation or aerated irrigation, has been developed, mixing pure oxygen, air bubbles or hydrogen peroxide solution into the irrigation water that flows and carries oxygen to the plant root zone. Researches have demonstrated that oxygation or adding oxygen into irrigation water may improve crop yield and quality. In order to explore mechanism of the improvement by oxygation, this review begins with the effects of hypoxia stress on soil biology, crop physiology and crop production, and influencing factors, quantitative indicators and evaluation criteria, and measuring and calculating methods of soil aeration. Then it summarizes characteristics, application methods, and biological effects of different oxygation technologies, and furthermore, problems existing in the researches. Besides, it discusses effects of oxygation or aerated irrigation on soil aeration. In the end, it brings forth prospects of the researches on oxygation or aerated irrigation in anticipation of providing some reference for future researches.