To better understand pre-service teachers' teaching anxiety in specific cultural contexts and promote their overall anticipatory socialisation process, this study investigated the level, dimensions and causality of Chinese pre-service teachers' teaching anxiety during student teaching. We conducted a survey of 426 Chinese pre-service teachers who were at the end of their bachelor or master programmes to become primary or secondary school teachers. The results of this study revealed that the participants experienced moderate anxiety (M = 25.51), with more concerns about their professional teaching competencies (M = 10.75) and teaching management ability (M = 7.66) than personal image, personal affairs and evaluation (M = 2.92, 2.35, 1.82). Moreover, gender, educational background, self-concept, student ability, job demands and job resources were correlated with teaching anxiety. Among these, self-concept and job demands best explained teaching anxiety with estimated regression weights of -0.541 for self-concept and 0.079 for job demands (p < 0.001). This study contributes to the literature on teaching anxiety by exploring culturally specific elements in China and offers valuable implications for interventions to reduce anxiety among pre-service teachers.