ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the changes being promoted by the Chinese government’s plan and vision, particularly as they are stated within the Outline of the National Long-Term and Short-Term Education Reform and Development Plan, and how they are in tandem with the new teacher roles emerging based on research on Western-educated Chinese English language teachers. Earlier, the teachers faced many challenges in their efforts to reconcile the disjuncture between what they had learned in their western programs and what was in place at home, and to change the status quo by building bridges between communicative language teaching (CLT) and existing Chinese pedagogy. The development of human resources through education is essential for China, through the National Economic and Social Development (NESD), to move away from its long-standing image as the worlds’ factory providing the cheap labor of workers with limited education, to that of being a world center with an educated and technologically advanced labor force by the year 2020.
