Leadership has been increasingly distributed away from formal leaders towards more shared arrangements in Western educational contexts, wherein the vast majority of the existing research literature has been based. There is a dearth of literature on whether leadership strategies that originate in the West could be applied successfully to Asian contexts, especially in relation to China. The need to expand the literature beyond the Western context prompted the authors to conduct this study, which explores how the distinctive aspects of Chinese culture might influence educational leadership. Drawing upon empirical evidence from 42 semi-structured interviews with faculty members in a Chinese university, this study suggests that the development of leadership towards a more distributed or shared model is heavily influenced by cultural aspects such as harmony and socialism, but that even in organisations in which institutional leadership is hierarchical, it is possible for departmental leadership to be less so.