Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This entry describes the current panorama of ESP in China, examining its development, challenges and innovations regarding theoretical bases, pedagogical practices and future directions, as well as its status and role within the country's linguistic and educational policies and its sociocultural implications. From a diachronic overview of ESP in China that highlights the 21st century as a significant point of inflection, the entry goes on to enumerate and summarize the major theoretical and analytical approaches that have blended to shape the discipline: Genre and Needs Analyses, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Hyland's 2005 metadiscourse model, together with a recent influence of Cognitive Linguistics and various sociocultural theories. Next, it features its pedagogical practices and innovations, which revolve around authenticity, interdisciplinarity and technology‐enhanced learning, mainly with virtual reality simulations, Learning Managing Systems, and artificial intelligence to enrich project‐based, flipped classroom and gamification methodologies. The key challenges addressed are the shortage of qualified instructors combining linguistic and domain‐specific expertise, the balance between linguistic and disciplinary content in syllabi, institutional constraint, and the future incorporation of more holistic and holistic approaches.</jats:p>