The idea of "powerful knowledge" has been developed by Young (2008; 2010; 2012; 2013), who argues for a subject-based curriculum. This notion has created widespread debate within the fields of sociology of knowledge and the sociology of the curriculum. Young's work takes a social realist perspective to describing the academic disciplines and school knowledge, and in turn epistemic access to disciplinary knowledge for students across all social classes. In this paper, I examine how Second Language Chinese (L2 Chinese) meets the requirements of "powerful knowledge". In particular, I examine how the L2 Chinese curriculum has faced an acute lack of properly structured knowledge to date. The lack of sequenced essential instructional concepts has resulted in there being no given L2 Chinese curriculum and there not even being a functional theory to guide theoretical knowledge within the curriculum to date. The largest challenge in dealing with a conceptual, knowledge-driven curriculum for non-Chinese background second-language classroom learners (L2s) lies in establishing criteria to determine what knowledges are most worthwhile. Morever, it may be the case that the curriculum is not suitable for all students and must be arbitrated by what I term "powerful pedagogy".