Reform initiatives are common throughout the Chinese early years education sector. This paper proposes a conceptual framework of a folk pedagogy of change as a perspective on the systemic barriers to the development of practice which foregrounds some of the tensions within and across these barriers. Our analysis is based on three commissioned literature reviews and site visits with practitioners and parents to Chinese Kindergarten and early years settings. The use of situated learning theory as a perspective for analysing interconnected and interdependent organisations is offered as a way of extending our understanding of educational change. This enables a move beyond a simplistic and essentialist notion of culture which locates implementation problems at the incompatibility of varied cultural perspectives. A folk pedagogy of change can help to understand why a range of educational contexts might be resistant to externally generated ideas for educational change.