TEACHER WELL-BEING AND PROFESSIONAL SUSTAINABILITY IN CHINESE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

Teacher well-being has become a strategic issue in educational development because it shapes retention, instructional quality, professional commitment, and the long-term capacity of education systems. In China, the issue has become especially urgent amid intensified accountability, rapid digital transition, uneven regional development, and rising expectations for teacher professionalism across schools, vocational institutions, and universities. This article examines teacher well-being and professional sustainability in Chinese educational institutions from an educational administration perspective. It argues that teacher well-being should not be treated as a private psychological matter or as a short-term welfare concern. Rather, it should be understood as an institutional outcome produced by policy design, governance arrangements, organizational management, and leadership practice. Drawing primarily on Job Demands-Resources theory and Self-Determination Theory, the article synthesizes recent Chinese and international literature and shows that the balance between demands and resources is central to professional sustainability. Heavy workload, administrative burden, unstable evaluation regimes, and work-family conflict repeatedly appear as major threats, whereas professional autonomy, leadership support, collegial trust, decision participation, fair recognition, and development opportunities function as protective resources. The literature also indicates that these relationships vary across institutional sectors, especially between rural schools, vocational institutions, private colleges, and research-oriented universities. The article concludes that sustainable teacher development in China depends on embedding well-being into the core logic of educational administration. For Chinese institutions, this requires differentiated workload regulation, evaluation reform, participatory governance, stronger induction and mentoring systems, and policy implementation that aligns national reform goals with institutional realities.