Cadmium is a nonessential heavy metal pollutant in the environment and agricultural products. Cadmium pollution poses a serious problem to China, meanwhile, due to the huge pressure of food demand, the moderately polluted land covering a large area must continue to be engaged in high-intensity agricultural production, which is difficult to be used for remediation alone. Therefore, environmental remediation not only has a long way to go, but also relies on novel strategies that are totally different from those taken in developed countries. Chinese scientists previously proposed a strategy to combine low-accumulation crop germplasm resources with heavy metal hyperaccumulator plants. However, this strategy passively relying on natural plants and the environment faces the following bottlenecks: 1) Low-accumulation traits of heavy metals in existing crop germplasm resources are significantly affected by the environment, and the effect is difficult to control. 2) natural heavy metal low-accumulation crops are often accompanied by the low accumulation of essential nutrients, which have certain negative impacts on the nutritional quality and yield of crops; 3) natural hyperaccumulators grow slowly, have small biomass, and compete for the effective cultivation area. Due to those considerations, we propose the concept of “remediation-rice”, which specifically blocks the migration of heavy metal to edible parts to meet the food safety requirements, and promotes heavy metal accumulation in rice straws, allowing phytoremediation of heavy metals meanwhile producing safe grains in polluted paddy fields. The recent progress of our research team has conceptually verified the feasibility of “remediation-rice”, and the most recent progress will also be reported.