Abstract: The presentations of integer addition and subtraction in ten middle school mathematics textbooks, four from the People’ Republic of China (PRC) and six from the United States (US) were compared with respect to the worked-out examples, relevant illustrations, exercises, and irrelevant illustrations. All the PRC texts introduced integer addition by using models of commonly-applied situation- an approach that required the coordination of verbal, pictorial, and symbolic representations. US texts more often used pictorial and symbolic representations to introduce this topic. PRC books consistently presented a common vision of integer operations as a subspace of the rational number operations, a vision not evident in the US texts. Further analysis showed that PRC and US texts failed to (!) fully coordinate representations of integer addition problems with steps required to solve such problems; and (2) use the same concrete analogy to introduce both integer operation. PRC textbooks also used an inductive approach to develop general addition rules based on absolute values, while only one of the US texts presented a comparable generalization.