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When college entrance examinations act as gatekeepers to modern-sector jobs, the entire education system then becomes oriented toward these examinations. This occurs at the expense of learning for the sake of learning and other aspects of education that address the holistic development and well-being of students. In recent years in China, there has been growing concern that examination competition has compromised the quality of classroom teaching and learning and is detrimental to the development of skills necessary for the global knowledge economy. These concerns have given rise to a far-reaching set of education reforms known as the New Curriculum reforms which have aimed to move students to the center of teaching and learning and to transform teaching and learning so as to foster such capacities as creativity, innovation, collaboration, self-expression, engagement, enjoyment of learning, inquiry skills, problem-solving abilities, and ability to apply knowledge in practice. In this chapter, we use videotaped high school New Curriculum demonstration lessons to examine teaching and learning practices that are regarded as exemplary in the current reform context. We investigate how teachers are negotiating the competing demands of preparing students for the examinations and addressing the aims of the New Curriculum reforms. The nature of student participation in the classroom emerges in the analysis as a key indicator of the success of this negotiation.

Textbook content and curricula are artifacts that can serve as indicators of social contexts and societal values. In this chapter, we use qualitative and quantitative content analysis to examine the content of Chinese language arts textbooks for basic education during a period of curriculum reform in China at the start of the 21st century. Given the important role of the Chinese language arts in the socialization of students into official societal values, this study seeks to provide insight into the nature of the official world view in China and addresses the societal ambivalence between global vs. national/local and traditional knowledge vs. Western/contemporary knowledge. We find that there is a slight increase in themes that reflect contemporary global concerns such as creativity and social justice. We also find that, in the face of the globalizing cultural influences of the new millennium, there is a sustained emphasis on the role of the Chinese language curriculum in the transmission of traditional Chinese cultural values and on the cultivation in Chinese students of an appreciation of their rich cultural traditions.