Abstract: Recent years, breeding in soybean have made a great progress in the world. The theories and technologies of breeding have also been revolutionarized considerably. Breeding efficiency has been improved because of integration of various technologies in molecular breeding. Soybean molecular breeding which is based on marker-assisted breeding and transgenic breeding has been become an important method in soybean genetic improvement. Developments of research in soybean molecular breeding, transgenic breeding and molecular design breeding was summarized in this paper. The status and challenges of soybean molecular breeding in China were also analysised. Some problems for soybean molecular breeding such as method relative backwardness and lack of good variety were proposed. Some suggestions such as strengthen fundamental research and develope differnt models of soybean breeding were put forward in this paper.