With farming cultivation increasing steadily in intensiveness, obstacles to successive cropping, such as soil-borne pathogens, soil acidification, secondary salinization and unbalanced nutrient supply, occur more frequently, and seriously sabotage sustainability of the intensive agriculture. The threat is even more serious in China due to excessive application of N fertilizers and farmers’ poor knowledge about intensive agriculture. Firstly developed in Japan and the Netherlands in the early 2000’s as an alternative of chemical soil disinfestationand named as biological soil disinfestation (BSD) or reductive soil disinfestation (RSD) in Japan or anaerobic soil disinfestation (ASD) in the Netherlands and the USA, the method is now being widely applied in these countries. RSD refers to the pre-planting soil treatment method, i.e. applying decomposable organic materials at a very high rate to the soils infested with soil-borne pathogens, flooding or irrigating the field to water saturation, and mulching the field with plastic film to limit gas exchange between the soil and the atmosphere and create the soil in a very intensively reductive state for a short period of time (a few days). The method can be conducted in the fallow season between two crops when temperature is higher than 25℃ and the treatment usually lasts 2~4 weeks mainly depending on temperature, amount of the organic material applied, and population of pathogens. The researches have demonstrated that the method controls a broad-spectrum of pests and is an alternative to chemical fumigation with gaseous pesticides, such as methyl bromide, effective to eliminate or reduce the populations of fungal and bacterial pathogens and root-knot nematodes. The mechanisms of RSD for disinfestation include: 1) creating an anaerobic condition that kills aerobic soil-borne pathogens; 2) producing substances harmful and toxic to the pathogens during the treatment period; and 3) altering structure of the soil microbial community and inhibiting the activity ofsoil-borne pathogens. Besides, the RSD method has some effects of increasing soil pH and alleviating soil secondary salinization, and its application is universal and environment-friendly. An introduction is presented in the paper to the development, mechanisms for suppressing soil-borne pathogens and remediation of acidified or secondarily salinized soils, and factors influencing the effectiveness of the RSD method and prospects of the application of the method as well.