How Mainland China Teaches Maths Differently — and What Hong Kong Could Learn

I did my primary schooling in Chengdu in the 1990s. The mathematics classroom I remember was a very particular place. The desks were in rows. The teacher stood at the front. On the blackboard, each day, was a method — one method, explained in detail, practised to completion. The next day: a variant of that method. The day after: a harder application. The week after: a review. Then, and only then, something new.

Mastery before progression. This was the logic of the system, and it was enforced with a rigidity that, in retrospect, I both admire and critique.

I have been teaching in Hong Kong for nine years now, at an international school that serves a very different population from the Chengdu primary school of my childhood. I also tutor privately, and a significant portion of my private students are local school students whose parents are anxious about their mathematical progress. I sit, professionally, in multiple curricula simultaneously. What I observe across them is clarifying.

What mainland Chinese primary maths does differently

The most significant structural difference is sequencing philosophy. Mainland Chinese mathematics education — particularly in the national standard curriculum used across most provinces — commits to what educators call mastery sequencing: a topic is taught, practised, assessed, and consolidated before anything adjacent is introduced. Fractions are not touched until whole-number operations are fully secured. Multiplication is not extended until the multiplication tables are known not just adequately but automatically.

This produces students who can appear, from the outside, to be moving slowly. A Chengdu P2 student might be working exclusively on double-digit addition and subtraction while their Hong Kong counterpart is being introduced to multiplication. The Chengdu P2 student, however, can typically do double-digit addition and subtraction reliably, quickly, and in unfamiliar problem contexts. The Hong Kong P2 student, having encountered more topics, may be shakier across all of them.

The second difference is the role of memorisation. In mainland Chinese primary maths, rote memorisation of certain facts — multiplication tables, common fraction-decimal equivalencies, measurement conversions — is treated as a prerequisite to understanding, not a supplement to it. The logic is that working memory freed from computational basics can be applied to problem structure. If I know immediately that 7 × 8 = 56, I can focus my cognitive resources on the problem setup rather than computing the multiplication. There is genuine research support for this position.

The third difference is problem-solving pedagogy. Mainland Chinese maths instruction tends to present a limited number of problem types, worked exhaustively. A particular problem structure — say, the "speed-distance-time" word problem family — will be introduced with a standard solution method, practised across many variants, and then extended to non-standard versions only after the standard is secure. This produces students who are very good at recognised problem types. It can produce brittleness when the type is unfamiliar.

What Hong Kong primary maths does well

Hong Kong's curriculum, particularly in international schools, tends to cover more breadth and emphasise conceptual understanding alongside procedural fluency. At its best, this produces students who can explain why a method works, who can transfer procedures to novel contexts, who approach new problem types with more flexibility.

The local curriculum is also, in my observation, better than mainland curricula at integrating real-world application in the early years — money problems, measurement in practical contexts, data from familiar settings. This contextualisation is pedagogically sound; concrete contexts help children build the mental models that support abstract reasoning later.

Where each struggles

Mainland Chinese maths education's weakness, which I observed in myself as a student and observe in my Chengdu-educated peers, is precisely the brittleness I mentioned. Present a problem outside the familiar taxonomy and the well-trained student can be more helpless than a less-drilled student who has developed more flexible thinking. The other weakness: the emotional environment. The drilling culture can be punishing for children who learn at different speeds, and the shame of being behind is real and significant.

Hong Kong's local curriculum has a different problem: breadth without depth. The curriculum covers a great deal, moves quickly, and the result — for many children I tutor — is a thin layer of familiarity across many topics without the deep consolidation that allows confident application under pressure. The DSE candidate who knows, intellectually, how to handle many question types but whose foundational arithmetic is not automatic will find that the cognitive load of computation eats into the cognitive resources needed for strategy.

What I would actually recommend

If you are a Hong Kong parent managing your child's primary maths education, I would suggest selectively borrowing from the mainland emphasis on consolidation. Not the drilling culture — but the commitment to not moving on until something is genuinely secure. Before your child moves to multiplication, can they add and subtract fluently? Before fractions, can they multiply comfortably?

The multiplication tables are worth memorising, not because rote learning is a deep educational value, but because the working memory freed by automaticity is genuinely useful for everything that follows.

And the willingness to slow down — to spend longer on fewer things and know them well — is, I think, the specific gift that mainland maths culture has to offer. Not all of its practices are worth adopting. But this one is.