China's heated education policy climate in 2010 indicated an increasing national concern for improving educational quality and educational quality assessment. Despite glowing portraits of Chinese education painted by international observers, the Chinese public has expressed consistent dissatisfaction with educational quality. The inter-related research projects described in this article were launched with a desire to deepen comparative discussion of educational quality and to respond to China's drive to improve and assess educational quality across all levels of schooling. This paper will introduce how educational quality is framed in key policy reform documents shaping Chinese education over the next decade. This will provide the backdrop for findings from two research projects that represent an effort to re-focus quality and quality assessment debates on high school and college students and their educational experiences. Derived and adapted from over a decade of robust research on student engagement in the U.S., the research projects include surveys on student engagement, a key factor in effective educational practice largely missing from Chinese quality assessment frameworks and toolkits. (Contains 11 notes and 1 figure.)