Contemporary Chinese teachers are being transformed into morally divided subjects by institutional teacher-evaluation governance. They claim such institutional governance can "devour" their basic professional ethics of "teaching with 'liangxin'" (??), a reinvoked Confucian ethical notion. Then, how does "liangxin" work as a cultural governing thesis in historical and present Chinese society? How does such "devouring" become possible? In what ways are teachers mobilizing their ethical "liangxin" to encounter and counter institutional governance? Borrowing Foucault's governmentality theory, and historicizing the reinvoking of Confucian "liangxin", this paper aims to answer these questions.