Early childhood education in China has gone through a century-long development process and has made great progress in the past two decades. Contemporary early childhood education is becoming diverse in its forms and educational approaches, and is aligning itself with the increasingly open and diversified society. It is clear that early childhood education in China is strongly influenced by sociocultural changes and reflects the hybrid of traditional, communist and Western cultures. We should re-think what happened in past years and continue to promote reform and development in early childhood education.

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This paper reviews early childhood teacher education in the People's Republic of China in the past years and raises the issues about teacher's education in the future. With thinking about early childhood education reform in China, unevenness in development in different areas and regions, and disparity in resources and programming among teacher education programmes at different levels, teacher education is confronted with great challenges. New policies and teacher education programmes have to be concerned more ecologically with how to have improvements in the real context. The countermeasures and strategies to deal with the problems of early childhood teacher education are identified.

This paper reports on the findings of a survey conducted in relation to current Shanghai early childhood education via a self-assessment tool developed by the Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI). The investigation results of the most items are consistent with the values which the designer of the self-assessment tool holds. It shows that, to a great extent, the beliefs of the staff in early childhood care and education institutions (ECCEI) in Shanghai are consistent with the principles of the Global guidelines for early childhood education and care in the 21st century determined by the ACEI. In relation to care and education practices, the real situation of the staff of ECCEI in Shanghai is basically consistent with the results of the investigation.