Rethinking quality in Early Childhood Education ( ECE ) from Chinese children's perspectives: Engaging with, resisting and reimagining institutional and social norms

While the concept of ‘quality’ in Early Childhood Education (ECE) has been widely theorised, it remains largely shaped by adult‐centric perspectives and globalised frameworks that prioritise standardisation and developmental outcomes. This paper explores how Chinese children understand and experience quality in ECE. By inviting children to respond to the question ‘What is a good kindergarten?’, the study investigates how they interpret quality through their daily experiences, routines and responses to rules and social norms within kindergarten settings. The research involved 64 children aged approximately 6 years from two public kindergartens in two developed Chinese cities. Data were collected through a two‐stage process: individual interviews prompted by children's drawings and group interviews following collaborative block‐building activities. Findings suggest that children construct quality not only through alignment with institutional norms, such as national ceremonies and classroom routines, but also through acts of resistance, emotional expression and imaginative reconstruction of space. For those children, quality is not defined by fixed standards, but is something they experience when they feel safe, recognised and free to make choices. Their narratives highlight the significance of relational care, spatial flexibility and the freedom to exercise agency. This study challenges the notion that quality can be universally defined or externally measured. Instead, it proposes an approach to quality grounded in children's lived experiences. In doing so, it contributes to efforts to rethink early childhood policy in ways that value children's perspectives, support their agency and attend to the social and cultural contexts in which they learn and grow.