This paper attempts to compare interactions between social changes and the integration of nationalism and multiculturalism in the context of music education by focusing on the ways in which the governmental politics of mainland China and the United States have managed nationalism and diversity in school music education. This paper also explores the ways in which music education, in response to different sociopolitical contexts, relates to the teaching of both musical and non-musical meanings in the dual context of nationalism and multiculturalism, and discusses some of the challenges facing music education in music classrooms today in these two nations. This paper argues that the interplay of tensions in the current wave of nationalism and multiculturalism seen in both mainland China and the United States show the enduring nature of state ideologies in a dynamic, contentious process of social construction.