<p>The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum was considered world-leading when it emerged with its new emphasis on generic key competencies. It was underpinned by a student-centred, future-focused narrative aiming to contribute to developing the knowledge and skills students would need to succeed as economically productive citizens in a new global economy. However, recent reforms indicate a shift away from generic competencies towards greater knowledge content specification. This move away from key competencies is interesting within the context of a China/New Zealand comparison, given that the Chinese educational context appears to be moving away from a ‘traditional’ content driven approach to education towards incorporating some 21st-century learning ideas, including key competencies and promotion of learner-centred pedagogies. Firstly, we provide a brief overview of the emergence of key competencies in New Zealand and then we compare that with their emergence in China including the development of what we term ‘subject’ key competencies. We use chemistry as an example to illustrate the subject-specific nature of these competencies in the Chinese educational context compared to the more generic competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum. Unlike New Zealand, the Chinese approach has maintained a strong disciplinary grounding for the development of competencies that is more aligned with research about the domain specificity required for the development of competencies and skills. We examine these seemingly opposite movements in direction through Young &amp; Muller’s 3 Futures Model and Bernstein’s concept of recontextualisation.</p>