The Government-Funded Teacher Education Policy (GFTEP) has been implemented since 2007 in the six teacher-training universities directly under the Ministry of Education, P. R. China. Informed by the Expectancy-Value theory and the Undermining Effect of Extrinsic Reward theory, the study reported in this thesis explores the impacts of this funding policy on career-choice motivation and study engagement of Chinese pre-service teachers. It employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods with the quantitative approaches as a base to explore the impacts of the funding policy and the qualitative methods as an additional follow-up layer to reflect on the quantitative findings. Quantitative data were obtained via 712 questionnaires administered to Chinese pre-service teachers from three universities in P.R. China. These participants are comprised of the policyfunded pre-service teachers (N=309) and the self-sponsored pre-service teachers (N=403) in their first-year and last-year undergraduate studies in diverse teacher-training programmes. These data were analysed through multiple quantitative methods. Qualitative data were gathered by online audio interviews with seven policy-funded pre-service teachers having different attitudes towards the funding policy, and reported in seven narrative stories. The main finding reported in this study was that the funding policy has had no negative impacts on Chinese pre-service teachers’ motivation to choose teaching as a future career or on their current study engagement in teacher-training programmes. The finding could be supported by the Expectancy-Value theory together with the narrative stories which argue that the opposite impacts of different terms in the funding policy on career-choice motivation and study engagement could counteract with each other to show “no negative impacts”. This finding, along with the relatively higher intrinsic career-choice motivation of policy-funded pre-service teachers, suggests that the policy aim to establish a stable and high-quality teaching force for the country has the potential to be achieved. However, potential undermining effects of the funding policy on intrinsic career-choice motivation and study engagement were identified, which suggest the funding policy still needs to be improved. In addition, findings of this study added knowledge to the research field of teacher motivation in Chinese context, such as the types, ranking, and classification model of career-choice motivation for Chinese pre-service teachers, and the relationship between their career-choice motivation and study engagement. Chinese pre-service teachers’ demographic profile, iv perceptions about teaching, and attitudes towards the funding policy were also described in this study. Implications of these findings for the funding policy, teacher education, and career education in China are discussed. Recommendations are also suggested with the aim of increasing Chinese pre-service teachers’ intrinsic career-choice motivation and study engagement through targeted education policies and practices