ABSTRACT
China’s educational reform has fluctuated over the past thirty years and has primarily been a top-down process, guided by government actions and influenced by the intersecting effects of a modernizing country, modernizing regions, and modernizing human beings. Reforms started in the early period of reform in the 1980s. They were vigorously promoted until the late 1990s, after which time they have been relatively moderate. The process has been incremental, and greatly influenced by external pressures. Without sufficient economic growth, comprehensive reform of educational systems in the country would have been very difficult.
