With the policy of opening to the world and economic reform in the late 1970s, China has experienced tremendous socioeconomic changes. To catch up and compete with the advanced countries, the national goals have shifted profoundly from the traditional goal of moral inculcation stressing cooperation, to the economic goal of modernization emphasizing competition, and then to the general goal of revitalizing China through education, science and technology. Concurrent with this shift, education policies and practices also change. To respond to the national goal and to answer the call of Deng Xiaoping that education must be oriented to the four modernizations, Chinese education has undergone a series of reforms, led by the State Education Commission (SEC), since the 1980s. To this end, since the 1980s, quite a few important education documents were issued, including: (1) "The Central Government's Decision on Education Reform", 1985; (2) "Compulsory Education Law of People's Republic of China", 1986; (3) "The Outline of Chinese Education Reform and Development", 1993; (4) "Basic Education Reform toward 21st Century: Quality Education", 1998; (5) "Decision on Deepening the Educational Reform and Improving Quality Education in All-Round Way", 1999; and (6) "The Action Plan to Revitalize the Education Towards the 21st Century", 1999. Most noticeably, since 1996 the most important part of Chinese educational reform has focused on a quality education, which aims to cultivate all-around, well-developed citizens who are more creative, independent, and capable of dealing with challenges in an increasingly competitive world. These educational reforms, as well as the resumption of the university matriculation exam in 1977, have triggered a great change in the educational arena and will continue to generate radical reforms in many other aspects of society impacting the nation's economic growth and competitive competence. (Contains 7 endnotes.)