There has been an increasing amount of interest in the interrelationship of motivation and strategy use in L2. The present study explores the influence of achievement motivation and attributional beliefs on learners' strategy use in China. The findings can be summarized as follows: (1) As for the relationship between strategy use and proficiency, learners who have passed CET 4 use the four categories of learning strategies in SILL significantly more often than those who have failed; (2) Levels of achievement motivation have an effect on the choice of learning strategies; (3) Four attributional beliefs are found to be powerful predictors of learning strategies in terms of their categories. The findings of this study provide some implications for English teaching and learning in China.