In 2003, a curriculum reform of education was initiated in mainland China to improve the quality of senior secondary education. The major purpose of this reform was to move from a teacher-centred to a student-centred approach in teaching. In order to find out how teachers coped with the challenges of the reform and how their work was affected, an in-depth study was conducted at a senior secondary school in City B, Guangdong, using qualitative research. While the curriculum reform was found to offer teachers an opportunity for re-professionalisation, teacher development in the sample school was revealed as having changed towards an assigned professionalism. In addition, teaching research officers limited themselves to instruction on practical teaching techniques. Furthermore, the existence of teacher leadership on a subject panel was heavily dependent on the panel head's leadership style. On the whole, the tendency was for teachers to be explicitly instructed to partake in contrived collegiality and imposed reflection.