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Meredith Chen

For generations of Chinese schoolchildren, English textbooks offered a glimpse of an unfamiliar world, from London’s Tower Bridge and Big Ben to American school life and Halloween traditions.
Today, students opening an English textbook are more likely to encounter passages on late Qing dynasty (1644-1912) thinker Liang Qichao, the Dragon Boat Festival and China’s overseas aid projects.
These changes are part of a nationwide overhaul of China’s primary and middle-school textbooks, which have shifted their focus towards Chinese culture and “telling China’s story” of national achievements, sparking debate over the purpose of English education in China.
The revised textbooks – which have been introduced in stages since 2024 and were fully rolled out at the start of this year’s autumn semester – have dropped much of the content on foreign cultures found in older editions as Beijing seeks to align education more closely with national priorities, including strengthening patriotism and boosting China’s image overseas.
The changes have been praised by some parents and teachers who argue they will boost students’ cultural confidence, while others worry that they will limit children’s exposure to the wider world and undermine their English proficiency.
Integrating Chinese cultural content into English courses was a growing education trend, state news agency Xinhua wrote in April 2025.


The changes are reflected throughout primary and middle-school textbooks. Lessons place a strong emphasis on traditional festivals, Chinese historical figures, archaeological discoveries and the country’s modern economic, social and technological developments, according to teachers and Chinese media reports.
The textbooks also introduce contemporary government policies, such as the idea of a “new socialist countryside” and the goal of building a “community of a shared future for mankind”.
“I’ve been waiting for this change for many years,” a veteran English teacher wrote on social media.
“Learning a language has never been just about the language itself. It is about learning how to use it to engage with the world. In the past, we learned to ‘listen to others’. Now we are finally learning to ‘speak for ourselves’.”
Many others questioned whether the shift had gone too far.
“There’s simply too much Chinese culture, ideological content and local elements in today’s English textbooks,” said another English teacher with a decade of experience.
“We all agree that building confidence in Chinese culture is absolutely a good thing,” the teacher wrote.
“But at its core, language learning is about entering other cultures, understanding different ways of thinking and seeing a diverse world.”
The teacher argued that the generations who grew up using the older textbooks were not “eroded” by foreign cultures.
They added that without exposure to foreign cultures and customs, students could struggle to develop a sense of curiosity about the language. Without any novelty, they said, studying English could easily become dull and formulaic.


Some teachers criticised the new textbooks for turning English lessons into nothing more than “exercises in translating Chinese culture into English”.
They said China needed people who could use English to present its culture to the world, but using a foreign language to express ideas and content already familiar to students could undermine the point of learning it in the first place.
Some also noted that parts of the new textbooks were in “Chinglish”, saying students were learning how to fit Chinese ways of thinking into English sentences rather than developing more natural ways of expressing themselves in English.
But while teachers debate the impact on language learning, Beijing’s top leadership has made clear that political direction takes priority.
The latest high-level signal on textbooks and ideology came last week when senior officials at a national conference called for building a “high-quality textbook system with Chinese characteristics”.
Speaking at the conference last Tuesday, Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang highlighted the “political, people-centred and strategic” nature of education and said textbooks should have the “correct political direction and value orientation”.
The textbook overhaul is part of a broader national push to promote “cultural confidence”, a term used by President Xi Jinping to describe a belief in the value and vitality of Chinese culture.
In 2016, Xi described the essential “Four Confidences” – confidence in the path, theory, system and culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. The formulation was later added to the Communist Party’s constitution.
The push to strengthen patriotic education and cultural identity building in schools has been solidified through successive policies.
In 2020, the Ministry of Education announced a ban on foreign-published textbooks in primary and junior high schools.


The approach was given legal backing in 2023, when the Patriotic Education Law required patriotic education to be incorporated into different subjects and textbooks, stressing the importance of preserving and developing China’s traditional culture.
What kind of identity is being shaped by textbooks is especially sensitive in China’s ethnic minority areas. In 2021, the former head of the Xinjiang education department was handed a suspended death sentence for his role in writing and publishing a number of school textbooks that were deemed “problematic” by the local authorities for encouraging “separatist thoughts”.
The education ministry began to revise textbooks in March 2022, following the release of a new national plan for the compulsory education curriculum.
The new textbooks were rolled out in stages from autumn 2024, beginning with primary grade one and middle-school grade seven. The roll-out expanded in 2025 to primary grades two and three and middle-school grade eight, before covering all primary and middle-school grades this autumn.
Supporters of the revisions argue that the shift is intended to correct a long-standing imbalance.
“Over an extremely long period in the past, our foreign-language textbooks, including English textbooks, were seriously lacking in content on China’s fine traditional culture, revolutionary culture and advanced socialist culture,” said Dong Hongdan, an education ministry official, according to the 2025 Xinhua report.
English was particularly well suited to carrying out patriotic and cultural education, he said.
“If we want Chinese culture to reach the world, we first need to use language and forms of expression that others can understand to tell China’s stories well,” he said.
On social media, one teacher warned that a child who studied English without learning about the cultures of English-speaking countries might end up with “not cultural confidence, but a closed sense of self”.
“English textbooks should first and foremost be a bridge,” the teacher said. “Students need to learn to understand the world before they can truly speak to it.”
“Good English education,” they added, “is not about telling students what we already have, but showing them what else the world has to offer.”


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With revised textbooks focusing more on Chinese culture, critics worry students are losing sight of the broader world


With revised textbooks focusing more on Chinese culture, critics worry students are losing sight of the broader world.


Xi Jinping

Are Chinese students learning English just to ‘tell China’s story’?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}With revised textbooks focusing more on Chinese culture, critics worry students are losing sight of the broader world

With revised textbooks focusing more on Chinese culture, critics worry students are losing sight of the broader world