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This research began primarily in 1998 when the author started a district project in China funded by the Bureau of Chongqing Social Development (referred to hereafter as the Chongqing Project), which aimed at exploring possible solutions to teachers' problems of inservice training in Chongqing. The main impetus for starting this project derived from an investigation (Wang Jiaji, 1997) which claimed that between 2005 and 2010, most current backbone English teachers at schools in the Chongqing area would retire and that most current young teachers would be challenged as to whether they could cope with the even higher demands of work at their schools. Another reason for the project was that school teachers were required to attend in-service training to update their professional knowledge and skills according to national requirements, but most schools had a problem with a lack of English teachers and had difficulties arranging off-work training for the teachers. There were a number of conflicts between teachers work at school and teachers' need for development, in view of the fact that traditionally in-service training was mainly conducted by taking teachers away from their work. Moreover, there were other conflicts, according to Wang Jiaji (1997), such as that between the more theoretical training content and teachers' more practical needs, the former being regarded as too academic and having too little relevance to teachers' work. The Chongqing project was designed to deal with these problems by making schools the site of training through teachers' action research projects.
When this project was expanded into a further study for my doctoral research in 2000, I was involved in a project sponsored by the Teacher Education Section, the Ministry of Education (MOE), China. This project, named "the Gardener Project", aimed at selecting and training 10,000 top teachers of the main school subjects (Chinese, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Arts and English) at the level of middle school education in China. The key issue of the Gardener Project concerns "change" —the change of teachers knowledge, belief and classroom practice. The Gardener Project was later incorporated in the national educational reform of basic education in primary and secondary schooling, which was called the "new era of education change in China". This reform was launched by the Basic Education Section, the Ministry of Education (MOE), guided by the main principle that education is "for the development of every student and for the elevation of the whole nation". According to the plan of the reform, school curricula, course syllabuses, textbooks and subject standards would undergo changes gradually within the next 10 years. This reform pushes all schools and all teachers on the stage of changing. Teacher training, especially the training of in-service teachers, as one of the urgent tasks, has become more important than ever before. It is against such a background that I worked closely with 100 top English teachers from the Gardener Project to study issues in teacher development in China.