This book provides new insights into school leadership in Mainland China. To do this it investigates how Chinese school leadership is conceptualised in the international and Chinese literature; explores the shifting context within which Chinese leaders enact their leadership, including discussion of recent influential policies; extends understandings of the complexities of their work lives and locates indigenous understandings of Chinese school leadership in the political and socio-cultural context of contemporary China, and the theoretical and conceptual context of international school leadership.