This article investigates China’s recent reform to adopt accrual accounting in its public sector. It aims to offer an understanding of the sociopolitical influences that have shaped the reform by contextualising it against a history of Chinese government accounting practice and its surrounding discourses. Based on archival and published materials from the PRC between 1949 and 2019, this article examines antecedent discourses on government accounting from academic, government and news media sources. It uses the accounting discourse as a vantage point to understand the intellectual developments and discursive shifts that have since come to explain the recent Chinese government accounting reforms in connection to the Chinese context. While discourses leading up to the reforms seem to echo Western concerns of New Public Management on the surface, the analysis of this article demonstrates how the reforms respond to distinctly local pressures, ideas and objectives.
