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Abstract. The aquaculture wastewater in China has been faced with ever-more strict limitations on its discharges during recent years, especially for the freshwater pond aquaculture industry, and the same trend will continue in the future. Under this circumstance, intensive pond aquaculture (IPA) which is considered as an upgrade mode of the traditional pond aquaculture has been developing rapidly in China since 2013, but few literatures indicate its applicability. In this study, an improvement of IPA called intensive pond aquaculture system (IPAS) was made to investigate the benefits and water quality of the system, experiments on some commercial fishes cultivated in a modified earthen pond were conducted in a fish farm. The system mainly consists of raceways, recirculating water purification area, waste collection area, some equipments, sedimentation basins and purification pond. The results showed that the values of water temperature, dissolved oxygen (DO), pH, total ammonia nitrogen (TAN) and nitrite nitrogen (NO₂^--N) were within the reference range. During the whole production season, the costs (119,534.35$/ha) were mainly made up of pond rent, fingerlings, feed, electricity charge and wages, and the average profit obtained was 42,657.69 $/ha. Based on the study, IPAS has the advantages of environment-friendly, high efficiency compared with the traditional pond aquaculture. Future research should focus on the optimization of waste collection modes and the reduction of initial investment and production costs.