Teachers’ attitudes and behavioural intentions towards AI integration in Chinese higher education: a qualitative interview study

Introduction The rapid expansion of generative AI has intensified scholarly and policy debate over its role in higher education, yet university teachers’ attitudes towards its integration remain complex and context-dependent. This study explores how university teachers perceive, experience, and respond to AI integration in their teaching. Guided primarily by the three-component attitude model and informed by the technology acceptance model and the theory of planned behaviour, the study examines cognitive appraisals, affective responses, behavioural intentions, and perceived support needs. Methods The study draws on semi-structured interviews with 14 university teachers from four higher education institutions in China. The interview data were analysed using codebook-informed thematic analysis combining deductive and inductive coding. Results The findings indicate that teachers generally perceive AI as a supportive rather than substitutive educational tool, valuing it for improving efficiency, supporting lesson preparation, and enriching pedagogical design. Emotional responses varied from enthusiasm and a sense of accomplishment to caution, neutrality, and, in some cases, declining satisfaction. Across the interviews, teachers’ primary concerns centred less on their own replacement than on the perceived risks of inappropriate AI use for students’ independent thinking, reasoning, originality, and authentic understanding. Teachers’ intentions to adopt AI were therefore conditional and bounded, shaped by pedagogical purpose, disciplinary context, student readiness, and the need to maintain teacher control. Teachers also emphasised that sustainable AI integration requires more than general encouragement, calling instead for AI literacy development, discipline-sensitive support, specialised tools, and enabling institutional infrastructure. Discussion Overall, these findings extend contextual understandings of teachers’ AI acceptance by showing how adoption intentions are pedagogically negotiated and highlight the importance of supporting professional judgement and students’ independent thinking in higher education.