The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of competition on learning motivation among Chinese students in a classroom setting. The participants (N=52) were 7th-grade students from 2 Hong Kong secondary schools in a middle-lower class neighborhood. The students were randomly assigned to either competitive or non-competitive conditions in a 2-hour Chinese typewriting course. Their goal orientation, performance, task enjoyment, achievement attribution, test anxiety, and self-evaluation after failure were measured during the course. Compared to their counterparts in non-competitive conditions, students in competitive conditions had better performance for easy tasks. However, they were more performance-oriented and more likely to sacrifice learning opportunities for better performance. They were also prone to having more negative self-evaluations after failure. Although there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups of students in task enjoyment, achievement attribution, and test anxiety, the direction of the differences was consistently unfavorable for students in competitive conditions. The findings of the present study were primarily consistent with the predictions of goal theory in achievement motivation. Competitiveness induces performance goals and a more negative self-evaluation after failure for Chinese students in a classroom setting than it would for Western students in a laboratory setting. (Contains 1 figure, 2 tables, and 25 references.) (Author/JDM)