Although research on teacher professional development has been well investigated (West & Sanderson, 2025), especially in Western-Eurocentric contexts (Avalos, 2011), a gap persists in the literature concerning the professional trajectories of music educators within China’s ethnic minority regions. To fill this gap, this intrinsic case study (Stake, 1995), informed by actor network theory, aimed to identify the nonhuman and human actors and trace the processes of translation through which they assemble into a socio-material network that constituted the professional development of a Chinese music teacher working in the ethnic minority region of Guangxi, China. This research was guided by the following questions: 1) how is the professional development of a Chinese music teacher in Guangxi constituted as a socio-material assemblage of heterogeneous actors (human and nonhuman)? 2) through what processes of translation is this assemblage continuously re-assembled and reconfigured throughout the teacher’s career? Following the university’s Human Research Ethics Board approval for this study, the researcher selected the single participant using purposive sampling (Stake, 1995; Weimer, 2021). Data were collected through observation (i.e., observing the sample’s music demonstration lessons and volunteer music teaching), three semi-structured interviews, and documents (i.e., materials about music courses introduced by the Chinese government). This study adopted the actor-network theory to analyze data (Ödmo et al., 2023). Findings revealed the teacher’s professional development was not a linear progression, but a series of continuously re-negotiated assemblages. This process was shaped by the dynamic interplay of multiple forces (i.e., the teacher’s agency, the support and resistance from various human actors, the material affordances and constraints of nonhuman actors, and the broader institutional and discursive pressures). At the outset, the teacher’s pedagogical stance emerged in opposition to the Western classical canon, and later, in a rural school, his teaching was reconfigured by the practical challenge of a locked piano while being reinforced by the enthusiasm of students. The scarcity of resources catalyzed inventive and ethnically resourceful pedagogy, and the network achieved legitimacy through the national music teaching competition, which effectively black-boxed his lessons as exemplary music demonstration lessons. The findings suggest that teacher professional development should not be understood as a standardized acquisition of skills, but rather as a continuous, site-specific process of network reassembly. This research calls for future studies to re-examine the complexity of teacher development, offering a robust understanding of how professional growth is negotiated across diverse and marginalized landscapes globally. Keywords: teachers’ professional development, actor-network theory, Chinese teacher, actors