Over the century-long development of a Chinese national idiom in piano music, piano works arranged from folk songs have constituted a large proportion of the repertoire, and two relatively clear compositional directions have gradually emerged. The first, represented by composers such as Jianzhong Wang, takes Chinese folk songs or folk-style songs as its basis and makes “faithful” arrangements of their melodies; the second, represented by overseas Chinese composers such as Chen Yi, treats Chinese folk songs as resources for modern composition and subjects them to “modern reconstruction.” Jianzhong Wang’s folk-song arrangements place greater emphasis on the beauty and complete presentation of folk-song melodies. He frequently uses pentatonic treatment, ornamentation, imitation of the timbres of traditional Chinese instruments, variation form, and other means to preserve the folk songs’ bright character on the piano. Chen Yi more often treats folk-music materials as motivic resources for modern composition. Rather than preserving all of the original melodic material, she extracts such features as intervallic relationships and rhythmic accents and transforms them through a modern pianistic language. Taking representative piano folk-song arrangements by Jianzhong Wang and Chen Yi as its subjects, this article compares them in five respects: compositional context, melodic material, harmony and texture, formal structure, and performance interpretation. It argues that the two composers do not embody a simple opposition between “tradition” and “modernity, “ but instead represent two valid approaches to Chinese piano folk-song arrangement on domestic stages and in cross-cultural arenas.