Abstract
This study investigates the emerging variegated school and education regimes (SERs) in urban China during the political–economic restructuring in the 2010s. Criticising the existing literature for pursuing a national-scale, ideal and static embeddedness of SER in stylised territorial capitalism, this study develops an inter-scale analytical framework foregrounding urban political economy to link the SER restructuring, local socio-spatial transformation and changing political economy in the real world. This framework is based on variegated capitalism approach and multi-spatial meta-governance thesis with a focus on the extended and spatial function of SER at the urban scale. We substantiate the framework by investigating the three SERs in three Chinese cities. Attention is paid to how the municipality uses a specific SER to facilitate a specific local socio-spatial transformation, and how these actions stem from the new local entrepreneurial strategies that are induced by the changing national accumulation strategy. This study provides a new perspective to understand the recent and drastic socio-spatial transformation in Chinese cities, and shifts the research concern on the multi-level, variegated and dynamic embeddedness of SER restructuring in the geographical process of changing political economy.
Keywords
Introduction
The global financial crisis in 2008 has induced the global trade recession. In response to the decline of the export-oriented, production-based accumulation regime, the Chinese central government has made continuous and various efforts to stimulate the economy, among which the municipality-led suburban land development centred on real estate economy (Zhang et al., 2021). Between 2008 and 2014, 272 of China's 281 prefecture-level cities launched suburban new town development projects. On average, each city had 2.5 new towns developed in the 2010s. This fast suburbanisation has attracted scholarly attention, and has been considered as the state-led shift of excessive capital into the production of built environment to address the overaccumulation crisis in the production sector (e.g. Zhang et al., 2021). Recent studies found that since 2015, the Chinese state has used the new town development as a spatial strategy to facilitate the formation of new spatial division of labour/industry and new production/trade network designed by the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI; Zhang and He, 2020). Despite consensus on the crucial role of the new town development in China's changing political economy in the 2010s, limited attention has been paid to an important phenomenon during the rapid suburbanisation. That is, the emerging various school and education regimes 1 (SERs) in these new town areas, which are far from the conventional public school regime in China regarding the management system and enrolment policy.
How can we understand this SER restructuring and its local heterogeneity? Why do different cities develop different SERs in the new town areas? What is the role of SER restructuring in local socio-spatial transformation? If SER restructuring can be used to facilitate certain local socio-spatial transformation, how is it linked to macro-level political–economic transformation? To answer these questions, we argue for the necessity to investigate the urban political economy of SER restructuring, particularly the political–economic motivations underlying the closure, open and reconfiguration of a certain school. In addition, it is necessary to excavate the extended functioning of SER restructuring at the urban scale, especially its role in anchoring particular labour, industry and capital investment in certain places to form a new spatial division of labour and industry. These arguments are built upon two seminal ideas from existing literature.
Firstly, Thiem (2008) called for outward-looking social geographies of education, and criticised existing literature for being confined to the effect of contemporary SER restructuring within the education sector (e.g. school segregation and inequality in students’ performance) while overlooking its externalities on local socio-spatial transformation. For Thiem, it is necessary to investigate how certain education provisions and regulations produce space and how this process reflects the state-mediated geographical process of capitalism (e.g. the shift and agglomeration of labour, industry and capital). Secondly, Lipman (2004, 2007) examined the SER restructuring in Chicago. These studies unveiled how the local pro-growth coalition used the closure, open and reconfiguration of certain schools to attract/expel certain capital investment, population and labour in certain neighbourhoods. Lipman (2008, 2010) found that these geographical processes were carried out to facilitate the local entrepreneurial strategy that sought to rework Chicago from a declining industrial city into a global gateway city. The formation of this strategy was embedded in the US de-industrialisation strategy under neoliberal globalisation. Lipman (2004, 2007) aligned with Thiem's (2008) concept to indicate a solid nexus among SER restructuring, local socio-spatial transformation and macro-level political–economic transformation.
Inspired by the above two ideas, this study develops an inter-scalar analytical framework foregrounding urban political economy to investigate three emerging but different SERs in the suburban new town areas in three Chinese cities, namely, the public elite school in Chengdu, the state-owned education investment group operating for-profit schools in Mianyang and the developer–municipality collaboration in developing private school in Jiangyou. We investigate how the municipality used the new SER to facilitate the intended local socio-spatial transformation, and how these actions related to China's changing national accumulation strategy in the 2010s.
Apart from providing a new perspective to understand China's rapid suburbanisation in the 2010s, this study shifts the research concern from the national-scale, ideal and static embeddedness of SER in stylised territorial capitalism built upon the variety of capitalism thesis to the multi-level, variegated and dynamic embeddedness of SER restructuring in the real-world political–economic transformation. Methodologically, based on a critical review of the single-scalar analysis of SER restructuring that dominates existing literature, we introduce variegated capitalism approach (Peck and Theodore, 2007) and multi-spatial meta-governance thesis (Jessop, 2016) to develop an inter-scalar analytical framework to link SER restructuring, local socio-spatial transformation and macro-level political–economic transformation to deepen the understanding of contemporary SER restructuring.
In what follows, we critically review the existing literature and introduce the aforesaid two theories to develop an inter-scalar analytical framework to investigate the embeddedness of SER restructuring in political economy. The method for data collection is elaborated in Methodology section. The empirical investigations in the case cities are presented in School regime restructuring in three Chinese cities amidst changing political economy section. This article ends with our key conclusions and contributions.
Unveiling transitional education and school regime: From single-scalar to inter-scalar analysis
Critical review of single-scale analysis
School and education restructuring driven by neoliberal globalisation and market-oriented institutional transformation since the 1980s has received substantial scholarly attention. Despite consensus on the multi-scalar processes of SER restructuring (Verger et al., 2017), scholars of different disciplines prefer different analytical scales. Methodological nationalism is prevalent among political scientists, particularly influenced by Esping-Andersen's (1990) seminal work ‘Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’. This theory of welfare capitalism provides an approach in understanding different rationales of welfare provisions among economies. Two indexes – decommodification and stratification – are developed to evaluate whether the welfare policy is created for social rights protection or for capitalist (re)production. Based on these indexes, Esping-Andersen (1990) developed a trichotomy of welfare regimes – corporatist, social-democratic and liberal – to systematise the varying roles of the state and the market in welfare provision, including education, healthcare and social security among the western economies. In line with French regulation school and varieties of capitalism approach, Esping-Andersen's approach pursues the ideal embeddedness of archetypal welfare regime in stylised territorial capitalism. Such approach assumes the fixed functioning of a welfare/education regime in maintaining a national accumulation regime. Following Esping-Andersen, Holliday (2000) conceptualised the productivist welfare regime to refer to the tendency of the welfare policy in East Asian countries to specifically serve the economic policy and accumulation strategy.
However, the productive and protective logic have co-existed in policies on education investment and provision (Hudson and Kühner, 2009). The interweaving of productive–protective logic is found in housing and other welfare regimes (He and Chang, 2021). These findings echo the growing criticisms of welfare capitalism thesis for abstracting the ‘ideal welfare regimes’ (Stephens 2019). Arguably, the rise of globalised knowledge-based economy has driven the state to appreciate the human investment (productive) function of education welfare to consolidate the economic competitiveness of countries by nurturing the local population to be competent labour. Holliday (2000) argued that the economic globalisation and growing inter-state economic competition reshaped the ‘archetypal welfare regimes’ in the west. In addition, welfare regimes saw a co-existence of different types within a city (Stephens 2019). Hence, styling SER is problematic because it ignores the hybridity, variability and local heterogeneity of welfare regimes.
Shifting attention to the real-world institutional transformation in education provision and regulation, political scientists investigated the political economy of education marketisation and privatisation since the 1980s. Still, methodological nationalism and comparativism dominate this research stream. Ngok (2007) found that China's political–economic transformation from a planned economy to a market economy had caused the decentralisation and marketisation of education provision since the 1980s. Verger et al. (2017) systematised six different national pathways towards education privatisation and marketisation. The intersection and tension between various drivers have caused different pathways towards the privatisation and marketisation of education provision. These drivers are global (e.g. rising neoliberalism favouring small governments) and local (e.g. historically developed private religious school system), material (e.g. insufficient education provision) and ideational (e.g. cultural tradition favouring educational diversity). These studies suggest that: (1) SER transformation is an arena in which multiple social forces struggle to promote the transformation towards desired directions; (2) the government plays a crucial role in selecting and retaining a certain marketisation/privatisation strategy to frame a certain SER; (3) the capitalist crisis, either the economic, political and social, drives the state to restructure the educational institutions (Jessop and Sum, 2006; Verger et al., 2017). These findings echoed the account that a real-world welfare regime is constantly shaped by a variety of local factors and multi-scalar players (Stephens, 2019). Hence, methodological nationalism has prevented an inquiry into the local variations in SER restructuring within a country.
School-scale analysis is pursued by policy researchers. Focusing on how the marketisation has broken the conventional public–private dichotomy of schools, scholars developed a new taxonomy of schools according to their financing source, management body and socio-economic ends. The emerging private schools for public ends and public schools for profit ends obscured the traditional definition of public/private schools (e.g. Burchardt et al., 1999). In general, western economies show a trend in that the government shifts from education provider/school manager to regulator on tuition pricing and schooling quality since the 1980s (Bartlett et al., 2002). Studies also unveil how the neoliberalism affected the western governments to introduce inter-school competition and entrepreneurialise public schools (Whitty and Power, 2000). Public schools adopt market strategies and recruitment tactics to enhance school competitiveness to avoid closure by the government (Bulkley, 2007). A similar trend was also found in China (Mok et al., 2009).
Urban-scale analysis receives limited attention particularly from geographers. Two small streams of research have emerged. One focuses on quantifying the impact of new SER (e.g. charter school, voucher scheme and the abolition of school catchment areas) on school and residential segregation (Taylor and Gorard, 2001). The other focuses on urban struggles to resist the closure of public schools amidst education marketisation, which induces reflections on the extended functions of schools at the local scale (e.g. as a community centre for identity building and utility to anchor specific populations; Good, 2017). These findings echo the argument that SER restructuring is not only a top-down political–economic programme, but also shaped by bottom-up resistance and multiple desires of local stakeholders (Thiem, 2009).
Overall, studies based on single-scale analysis provide three key implications for inquiring contemporary SER restructuring. Firstly, SER restructuring co-constitutes with political–economic restructuring because of its productive role in economy. Investigating an emerging SER is therefore a means of understanding the temporally and geographically specific political–economic strategy (Thiem, 2009). Secondly, the forms of school provision and regulation are variegated. Even in the same form, the historical roots, ends and consequences of an SER vary across contexts; hence, understanding the embeddedness of an emerging SER in historically attuned political economy restructuring is important (Verger et al., 2017).
Lastly, national scale may not be appropriate to investigate the co-constitution of SER and political economy. National-scale analysis cannot explain the local heterogeneity of welfare regime (Stephens, 2019). Neoliberal globalisation has induced political and economic decentralisation worldwide; the local has become the leading scale to organise economic activities (Jessop and Sum, 2000). The downscaling of state power and accountability in organising economic activities and facilitating accumulation should have drawn attention to the local scale when considering the coupling of SER and political economy. Hence, investigating the extended functions of SER at the local scale and the local desires to restructure SER is critical.
Developing an inter-scalar analysis framework foregrounding urban political economy
Lipman's (2004, 2007) studies on Chicago's SER restructuring provide important evidence to understand the extended functions of SER at the urban scale. The author found that to make Chicago a global gateway city, the pro-growth coalition constitutive of the mayor, developers and businessmen used the open and closure of a specific type of school in a specific neighbourhood to attract the desired capital investment and high-end industries to the city. The closure of a public school in a poor neighbourhood helped to displace the unwanted poor black people, and facilitate urban renewal and promotion projects (Lipman, 2004). Introducing the catered school system to a regenerated neighbourhood was aimed to attract elite financiers, entrepreneurs and high-skilled labour to form a dual labour supply – the poor black was locked in the low-end labour market to serve the elites in the high-end industries. This dualism worked for Chicago's economic restructuring and globalisation strategy (Lipman, 2007). The shift of Chicago from an industrial city to a global gateway city served the new national accumulation strategy of the United States characterised by finance-dominated accumulation and de-industrialisation. This new accumulation strategy was co-constitutive of the new round of geographical expansion of capitalism and international division of labour since the 1980s.
Lipman's seminal studies have two key implications. Firstly, a certain SER is magnetic to a certain population and investment; SER restructuring is thus not isolated and aspatial. Rather, the process produces space and organises urban socio-spatial transformation. Hence, whether and how SER restructuring works with local development strategies deserves scrutiny. Secondly, urban scale has the property of connecting macro-scale political–economic dynamics and local politics of institutional and socio-spatial transformation. The former involves the change of national accumulation strategy that is subject to world economy/global capitalism restructuring (Jessop and Sum, 2006). The latter involves the variegated externalities caused by SER restructuring on local society, the changing benefit structure and struggles because of the restructuring, and the power mechanism that addresses these struggles (Good, 2017). Taken together, an inter-scalar analytical framework foregrounding urban political economy is valuable to capture the existing multi-level embeddedness of SER restructuring in political–economic transformation. Such framework involves two key questions: (1) whether and how SER restructuring and related socio-spatial consequence serve urban growth strategy and (2) how the urban grow strategy constitutes macro-scale political–economic transformation.
The framing of the research questions is supported by two influential macro-scale political–economic theories from geography. The first is the variegated capitalism approach (Peck and Theodore, 2007) that rejects an ideal and clean coupling of social institutions and accumulation mode built upon varieties of capitalism approach. This theory stresses the regional/city-level growth strategy, and localised coupling – how the local (non)economic institutional transformation works with the institutional transformation at the upper scales to facilitate economic restructuring. The difference between accumulation ‘mode’ and ‘strategy’ is critical: the former assumes a static equilibrium of institutions and economic activities that maintains a stable accumulation, while the latter stresses the crisis-driven and evolutionary nature of territory capitalism with a focus on how the state exerts efforts to restructure the institutions to search for a new growth strategy (Peck and Theodore, 2007).
The second is multi-spatial meta-governance thesis that views the local socio-spatial transformation as a project embedded in the broad attempts towards a new socio-spatial relation recombination (formation of new production/trade networks and spatial division of labour/industry) in response to periodical crisis; for Jessop and the regulation-theory-attuned Marxist geographers, state-mediated geographical process (e.g. the suburbanisation of capital/sectoral capital switch and the formation of new overseas market/spatial fix) is a way of addressing the periodical economic crisis (Jessop, 2016). Governing the socio-spatial relation recombination towards a new accumulation strategy relies on various strategies and power mechanisms to anchor certain economic activities, labour, industries and capital investment in certain places (Jessop, 2016). SER restructuring can thus be viewed as a strategy of governing socio-spatial relation recombination given its extended function of shaping local socio-spatial transformation.
Methodology
We apply this framework to examine the recent SER restructuring in three Chinese cities. As the fastest-growing country in the age of globalisation, China has experienced a drastic institutional transformation in various realms to frame the production-based, export-oriented accumulation regime, or the ‘world factory’ mode since the 1990s (Wu, 2016). Similar to other industrialised economies that sought to (re)integrate into the global production and trade network, the Chinese central government has decentralised political power to municipalities to centre the city scale to organise economic activities and fix the footloose industrial capital for growth (Wu, 2016). Since the global financial crisis in 2008, China has experienced a new round of drastic institutional transformation to overcome the overaccumulation crisis and search for a new accumulation strategy (Zhang and He, 2020). This was because the world trade recession has diminished the ‘world factory’ mode.
As illustrated in Figure 1, two leading national development schemes guide the formation of sectoral and local policies in the 2010s. One was ‘the Four Million Stimulus Package’ announced by the State Council immediately after the financial crisis. This scheme and related serial policies induce the municipality to pursue the property-led land development by conducting new town development projects for stimulating the local economy (Zhang et al., 2021). This political–economic restructuring has made the real state economy a nationwide pillar industry in the 2010s. The other was the BRI announced in 2015 to radically address the overaccumulation crisis by creating new overseas markets in Europe, central and western Asia, and Africa for China's huge production sector (Sum, 2019). Apart from actions to establish a new international trade regime, BRI involves serial domestic restructurings including (1) the transformation of western China from the provider of cheap rural labour to the eastern ‘World Factory’ to a new frontier of accumulation integrated into the production and trade network imaged by BRI; (2) shift of labour and land-intensive industries to western cities to leave space for industrial upgrade in eastern China; and (3) inducing rural labour in eastern China back towards western cities near their rural hometowns.
Embeddedness of local growth strategy and practices in national political–economic restructuring.
From the point of Harvey's Marxist geography, the ‘Four Million Stimulus Package’
Three cities in western China are taken as case studies, namely, Chengdu, Mianyang and Jiangyou. Chengdu is the capital city of Sichuan Province and one of the largest cities in western China. Mianyang is a medium-sized traditional industrial city. Jiangyou is small-sized city surrounded by rural areas. In the 2010s, the municipalities of the three cities constantly adjusted local growth strategies according to the changing economic–institutional environment and upper-level development plans. The actions induced the drastic and recent local socio-spatial transformations in the three cities. A 1-month field investigation in Jiangyou was carried out between July and August 2019. A 2-month field investigation in Mianyang was carried out between August and October 2019, followed by a 2-month field investigation between July and September 2020 in Chengdu. During the field work, 41 semi-structural interviews were carried out with officials of local education bureaus, housing and urban–rural development bureaus, and development and reform commission, senior managers of various types of schools and other stakeholders related to the local SER structuring (e.g. private investors). The aims of these interviews were to (1) understand the history of local education sector development and (2) excavate the political–economic motivations underlying certain SER restructuring. Interview transcripts totalled about 240,000 words were used for analysis. Site surveys around the restructured schools were carried out to examine the socio-spatial consequence of the SER restructuring.
The empirical analysis is unfolded by unveiling the emergence of different SERs in the three cities. Attention is paid to how the SER and related socio-spatial transformation served the local growth strategy and national political–economic programmes.
School regime restructuring in three Chinese cities amidst changing political economy
China had a pure public school system in the planned economy period. Since the Chinese Communist Party took the power in 1949, all the schools operated by religious and socio-economic organisations and individuals had been nationalised, with a homogeneous public school system established. As a part of the socialist workfare regime, urban elementary education provision from primary to high school levels was characterised by social equality. The central state distributed jobs and free welfare to socialist workers by managing state-owned work units. Each work unit built its own houses, schools and hospitals. Children enrolled in the schools of their parents’ work unit. Trans-unit labour mobility and school enrolment were normally prohibited.
The situation had changed since the market-oriented reform in the 1980s. The state-owned work unit system was abolished, and municipalities were empowered to Emanage public service provisions and scheme socio-economic development in their jurisdictions. Labourers were allowed to travel across cities, and housing marketisation-induced residential mobility. The house-based nearby enrolment system thus replaced the work unit-based enrolment system in cities. The idea of ‘social equality’ still dominated the elementary education provision because the previous public school system was maintained. In the late 1990s, the Chinese central state intended to fully integrate China into the global capitalism by enhancing China's attractiveness to foreign industrial investment. Nurturing quality and competitive labour forces through the diversification of education was therefore enacted as a national policy. Accordingly, the small-scale local experimentation on establishing new types of schools has been allowed since 2000. Nevertheless, the central state still required municipalities to maintain the vast public school system. Overall, since the 2000s, the coupling between political economy and SER has been rescaled from the national to local scale. We used the following cases to illustrate this local-scale political–economic embeddedness of SER.
Public elite school in Chengdu
Hamilton School was developed in 2017 in Tianfu New Town, which is the newly developed special economic development zone in Chengdu. This school is an elite school characterised by a mixed provision of Chinese elementary education and international education that supports students to enter overseas high schools. The school is located in the new rich district of Chengdu, namely, the Lu Lake luxury residential district. The enrolment policy of Hamilton School is innovative, following neither the conventional ‘nearby enrolment policy’ or the ‘examination-based enrolment policy’. Only two groups of people are allowed to apply to the school for their children: (1) the introduced talents to Tianfu New Town by Chengdu municipality and (2) the property owners of the luxury villas in Lu Lack area. Despite the outsourced school management to a private company, Hamilton School is a public school, fully funded and owned by Chengdu municipality. The campus and facilities of Hamilton School is among the best in Chengdu, but the tuition is free because the school is a part of China's 9-year compulsory education system. By 2020, about 250 students studied in Hamilton School. The rationale of developing such an unprecedented public elite school should be read from the political economy of Tianfu New Town development.
Tianfu New Town was planned in 2011 by Sichuan provincial government and Chengdu municipality as the most important local development project in the 2010s. The function of Tianfu New Town project in the local economic development is primarily threefold. Firstly, Chengdu municipality anchored the shifted electronic and producer service industries from eastern China by developing two new industrial spaces – Software Park and Dayuan Central Business District – in Tianfu New Town. Secondly, Chengdu municipality stimulated the local real estate economy by promoting property-led land development in Tianfu New Town. Thirdly and critically, Chengdu municipality improved the overall economic attractiveness of Chengdu by developing prime public facilities including wetland parks, museums, entertainment centres and commercial centres in Tianfu New Town. Since the announcement of the BRI, the central state orchestrated the shift of labour and industries to western China using a series of sectoral policies. Accordingly, inter-city competition rose to become the gateway city of the new production and trade network imaged by the BRI among the western megacities. Upgrading local public facilities and infrastructures was a key strategy used by the municipalities to seize the capital investment and development opportunities brought by the BRI. In addition to the introduction of large multi-nationals (e.g. Intel Corp) and leading Chinese enterprises (e.g. HUAWEI) to relocate several businesses to the new industrial space, Chengdu municipality aimed to attract successful small entrepreneurs to locate their businesses and homes to Chengdu by the top-class living and industrial condition in Tianfu New Town. By 2020, about two million people lived in Tianfu New Town.
In this context, the political–economic motivation to develop Hamilton school is clear. Lu Lack Area is a flagship real estate project developed by Chengdu municipality to promote Tianfu New Town as a world-class residence for attracting the super rich, successful entrepreneurs and property investors. In addition, the project was developed to appreciate the overall property price in Tianfu New Town. This area is characterised by the world-class water and art villas, the professional management team that organises a diversity of art exhibitions and club activities regularly, private golf course and race course. Hamilton School was partially developed as a key supporting facility to meet the demand of the elite class for elite education in Lu Lack Area, whereby to enhance the attractiveness of this area. In addition, Hamilton School was developed as a part of the talent introduction scheme of Chengdu municipality. To make Chengdu an export-oriented electronics and software production centre upon the BRI, Chengdu municipality developed a research and development centre in Tianfu New Town and implemented a new policy to attract prestigious research team leaders, creative labour and professional researchers by privileging these talents in accessing housing, schooling, healthcare and other welfare. Giving the introduced talents exclusive access to the quality schooling of Hamilton school is an initiative of the municipality to show the determination to favour the highly skilled labour for economic development.
Moreover, to facilitate the transformation of Chengdu from an enclosed inland city to a gateway city that is attractive to overseas investors, Chengdu municipality has proactively established sister-city relationships with the municipalities of foreign cities to collaborate on overseas investment promotion programmes. Hamilton city in New Zealand is one of Chengdu's sister cities. Hamilton School was also developed to serve the desire of Chengdu municipality to maintain an international partnership to attract overseas investors. This is the reason why Hamilton School was named after a New Zealand city. In addition, the municipality of Hamilton city was a nominal owner of the school and assigned a team of education specialists to improve its teaching quality.
In summary, the emerging public elite school was developed by Chengdu municipality to anchor the desired labour and investors in Tianfu New Town. The school worked with other spatial strategies of the municipality to create a middle-to-high-end housing sub-market in Tianfu New Town to stimulate the real estate development, and assisted the municipality strategy to globalise the city. The municipality deliberately operated these functions of Hamilton school to facilitate the local entrepreneurial strategy. This strategy aimed to transform Chengdu from an enclosed inland city to a regional gateway city. The formation of this entrepreneurial strategy was embedded in China's new accumulation strategies in the 2010s that sought to make real estate economy a pillar industry and to globalise western China into a new frontier of accumulation connecting domestic production network and overseas markets.
State-owned education group operating for-profit schools in mianyang
Mianyang Education Investment Group (MEIG) was established by the Mianyang municipality in 2010 by mobilising local fiscal revenues as the registered capital of the group. MEIG is owned by the Mianyang State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission 2 (SASAC), and is directly operated by the municipality. The senior managers of MEIG are also government members. MEIG directly operated three schools, all of which are not conventional public schools in accordance with China's ‘nine-year compulsory education policy’ to provide free schooling to local children. Rather, the three schools charge an annual tuition fee ranging from 20,000 to 50,000 CNY and provide luxury accommodating services to students at a price of 10,000 to 20,000 CNY a year despite being fully funded and operated by the state sector. By contrast, the average annual urban household income in Mianyang and Sichuan province was 56,448 CNY and 52,819 CNY in 2019. This disparity between the school cost and the average income level indicates that these state-owned schools were made for selling expensive schooling to the middle-and-upper class households rather than to provide low-cost schooling to working-class households.
Nominally, the three for-profit schools are the branch schools of the three most prestigious public schools in Mianyang but their funding source and management body are separate from public schools. In practice, Mianyang municipality mobilised the high-quality teaching force from the prestigious public schools to the for-profit branch schools to enhance their attractiveness to middle and upper class parents. The municipality also allowed the development of an innovative enrolment channel between the for-profit branch schools and the prestigious public schools independent from the city's unified entrance examination. 3 This institutional arrangement allows affluent parents to proactively secure a place in prestigious public high schools by purchasing the expensive school place in the branch primary schools from the municipality. The tuition of the three state-owned for-profit schools varys from 20,000 Chinese Yuan (CNY) to 100,000 CNY per year according to students’ academic performance. By 2020, about 15,000 students studied in the three schools. Clearly, such state-owned for-profit schools have gone beyond the conventional public–private dichotomy of schools, and against the post-socialist state's ideology of an equitable education system. The rationale of establishing MEIG and the three for-profit schools should be read out from the desire of the municipality to develop Mianyang into a competitive industrial city.
Yuanyi New Town, where all the three for-profit schools are located, was planned by the Mianyang municipality in 2009. About 200,000 people lived in Yuanyi new town by 2020. The political–economic motivation to develop Yuanyi New Town was twofold.
With the successful operation of MEIG in the 2010s, the Education Development Zone developed rapidly to concentrate the middle and high-end residential estates, prime private schooling and education facilities and a large number of affluent non-local households in Mianyang. According to our survey in 2019, the non-local households who have a child studying in the for-profit schools accounted for 48% of the property owners in Education Development Zone, and approximately 51% of the students in the three for-profit schools were migrant children. Recognising the income opportunities from the affluent parents, in 2016, the Mianyang municipality established two new art schools in Education Development Zone that specialise in selling expensive extracurricular classes. The estimate was that MEIG enriched the local fiscal revenues by a hundred million CNY every year in the 2010s, with which the municipality financed the industrial park development in the southern suburbs.
In summary, the emerging MEIG and state-owned for-profit schools are central to Mianyang's local entrepreneurial strategy in the 2010s. The municipality used the new SER to attract capital and property consumers to the new town area and gain additional fiscal revenues to finance the industrial development plan. This local development strategy that seeks to shift Mianyang into a competitive manufacturing city was embedded in the new national growth strategy to (re)industrialise western China.
Developer–municipality collaboration in new private school in Jiangyou
A key transformation of the education sector in Jiangyou was the emerging developer–municipality collaboration in developing new private school in suburban new towns. Jiangyou foreign language school (JFLS) was initially developed in the unpopulated western suburbs as a boarding primary school by a leading local developer, Huafeng Company, in 2012. This company has been one of the largest and most stable taxpayers in Jiangyou since the 2000s. Similar to Mianyang, Jiangyou was previously a socialist industrial city that rapidly declined in the late 1990s. For this reason, Jiangyou municipality supported several local entrepreneurs to develop real estate 5 and generate new tax sources. Despite being disadvantaged in the inter-city competition for foreign direct investment in the 2000s, Jiangyou municipality endeavoured to attract industrial investment by upgrading the local built environment and urban regeneration projects. This is another reason why the municipality supported local development.
Among the local small developers, Huafeng Company developed rapidly and became a leader in assisting the municipality to do urban regeneration projects (e.g. new residential and commercial areas development) in the 2000s. During this process, Jiangyou municipality developed a strong clientelist relationship with Huafeng Company because of its stable tax payment and indispensable role in governing the city's socio-spatial transformation. To support the development of Huafeng Company, the municipality sold them a large amount of cheap land in the west suburbs where a small suburban residential district was tentatively developed in the late 2000s. However, because of the lack of inflow of population and public facilities, the suburban properties were unsellable and Huafeng Company stopped developing suburban real estate projects.
The situation changed in the 2010s. In parallel with Mianyang and Chengdu, Jiangyou municipality pursued a real estate development to stimulate the local economy. Two new towns were planned accordingly. The southern new town was all new while the western one was developed on the undeveloped land held by Huafeng Company. Despite the credit easing that enabled developers to easily borrow money for land development, 6 the lack of quality public facilities, particularly schools, made the suburban properties less attractive. This is why Huafeng Company developed a boarding primary school in the western new town in the 2012. Still, the lack of population inflow depressed the suburban property market.
A turning point occurred around 2014. The decline of ‘world factory’ mode removed the need for the massive migration of lowly skilled peasant workers in eastern China in the 2010s. After the announcement of BRI, the Chinese central state has declared the industrial upgrade strategy, requiring costal megacities to develop local attractiveness to the high-end industries. To rearrange the excessive rural labour, the Chinese central government announced a new urbanisation strategy, Jiujin Chenzhenhua, that encouraged rural households to relocate to nearby small cities. Such a strategy induced the competition for the rural population among the small cities in western China. Jiangyou was a county-level small city surrounded by underdeveloped rural areas that provided cheap labour to eastern China. For Jiangyou municipality, a practical strategy was to attract affluent rural households 7 to purchase the expensive suburban properties, and the middle-income rural households to purchase the second-hand properties in the inner city, thereby driving the local urban households to purchase the suburban properties.
Accordingly, Jiangyou municipality made a distinction between the southern and western new towns, planning the western one into a wealthy area characterised by high-end residential estates, villas and prime landscape projects. By contrast, the southern new town was planned into a middle-income residential area with middle-class housing estates. To upgrade the residential condition of the western new town, Jiangyou municipality encouraged Huafeng Company to expand JFLS. In support, Jiangyou municipality invested in the school developments and became a shareholder of JFLS. Between 2015 and 2019, two new campuses of JFLS specialising in expensive middle school-level schooling (annual tuition fee is 18,000 CNY) were completed in the western new town. Given the municipality support in encouraging the mobility of senior teachers from the top public schools to the private school, and the sufficient money from Huafeng Company in developing prime campuses and facilities, JFLS has rapidly developed into the best school in the city, providing elite education and high-quality accommodation.
As summarised in Table 1, the function of the emerging developer–municipality collaboration in developing private school in Jiangyou is twofold. Firstly, the municipality used the development of JFLS to enhance the attractiveness of the expensive suburban properties and anchor the wealthy population using the top schooling in the western new town. Huafeng Company has taken on the most of the cost of developing JFLS, and therefore the municipality saved money to develop more normal-level public schools in the southern new town. Secondly, Jiangyou municipality consolidated the clientelist relation with Huafeng Company by allowing them to engage in the profitable education industry and maintain its monopoly of private schooling in Jiangyou. In 2017, the Chinese central government declared to curb the real estate development in the following decade because of the great property boom that destabilised the economy and financial system. Huafeng Company was eager to diversify its business to reduce the risk of the decline of real estate industry. For Jiangyou municipality, facilitating the transformation of Huafeng Company was important because of its reliance on the latter's steady tax revenues and execution of spatial strategies. This is why the municipality has refused proposals from several external investors to develop private schools in Jiangyou in the late 2010s. By 2020, about 30,000 people lived in the western new town and 100,000 people lived in the southern new town. About 7000 students studied in JFLS.
Embeddedness of SERs in political–economic transformation.
BRI: Belt and Road Initiatives; SER: school and education regime.
Source: Author summary.
Hybrid and contradictory schooling regime: State entrepreneurialism in action
The empirical analysis has demonstrated the leading and proactive role of the local state in innovating SER for facilitating spatial–economic restructurings. It suggests that the central state's production/growth logic has induced the school regime restructuring indirectly; it should have been the ‘unwitting’ propellent for these local restructurings. However, did the central government know these local initiatives; if yes, how did the central state respond to these local initiatives in restructuring SER? Arguably, the new SERs in the above three cases cities deprived the underclass in accessing quality schooling and (re)produced urban socio-spatial inequality. Does this mean that the protection logic in educational policy making is vanishing?
Divergence between central discourses and local practices
Answering these questions requires an understanding of the changing central–local state relations amidst economic globalisation in China through Wu's (2018) concept of ‘state entrepreneurialism’. The economic globalisation since the 1990s is widely argued to be accompanied by the rescaling of state power and functions in coordination with the shift of world capitalism towards a translocal flexible accumulation regime (Brenner, 2004). The market actors were empowered to organise and utilise social–economic resources. Meanwhile, the state established new governance structure and apparatus to perform its role in welfare provision and consolidate its sovereignty and territoriality (Brenner, 2004; Moisio and Paasi, 2013). This is the case of China (Xu and Yeh, 2009). Since the 1990s, radical institutional shifts have been made to drive municipalities to prioritise local economic growth (Wu, 2016). Meanwhile, the Chinese central state has designed new policies to mitigate uneven and unequal development in the course of fast growth (Zhang and He, 2020).
In the education sector, the central state has maintained a high level of spending on developing a free and quality elementary education system since the 1990s. Particularly, the central state operates a fiscal transfer system to secure sufficient provision of public schools in underdeveloped regions and rural areas. This indicates that protection/equity logic still dominates the national education policy making. A review of the relevant policy documents issued by the central authorities supports this account. As shown in Table 2, ‘educational equity’ and ‘equal access to elementary education’ were the core ideas of the major national educational policies issued between 1990 and 2020. However, in practice, as illustrated in the three cases, the municipalities have political space to innovate SER for supporting the urban entrepreneurial strategy, provided that they fulfilled their managerial role of maintaining a stable public school system in their jurisdiction. Such a situation can be understood through the concept of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ recently coined by Wu (2018). The central state is argued to have employed market instruments to achieve the centrally made national plans and political goals in the post-reform China. As the major source of state legitimacy, economic growth is prioritised, but it does not override other national goals, such as addressing redistribution issues and securing social stability, which are significant to the consolidation of territoriality and state legitimacy (Wu, 2018). Central-level institutional ambiguity is thus intended to give space for top-down informalities and initiatives in utilising market instruments to develop economy and implement political projects.
Evolution of national educational policy since 1949.
Source: Summarised by the author.
The above theory and discussions provide a valuable perspective to understand the divergence between central policy discourses and local practice related to SER restructuring. Then, a new question arises: In what situation the central state would intervene the local initiatives in restructuring SER? In practice, municipalities usually employed discursive strategies to package and justify SER restructuring for collective well-being (Zhang, 2022). Thus, local people could hardly discern how SER would disadvantage them. This precludes local resistance to SER restructuring. However, when the negative effects of small local experimentation on SER restructuring in various cities accumulate to engender national social, economic and political crises and hinder the new national plan, the central government would come to rebalance production/equity and production/growth logics via new institutional reforms. This account is substantiated by the recent de-marketisation reform of education sectors. In 2021, the central state announced serial policies for improving educational equity by rebuilding a homogeneous public school system. Municipalities were required to close or nationalise private schools in their jurisdictions.
The key motivation underlying this radical reform was that the previous educational policy advocating diversification of schooling went against the new national plan of Xi's regime. Since 2013, the new chairman of China has endeavoured to craft a balanced development mode in the context of economic recession and growing social inequality/polarisation after the three-decade fast growth. For one thing, the central state intended to improve social mobility and reduce social inequalities for stabilising society and consolidating state legitimacy. For another, the central state intended to promote Made in China to climb the global value chain in response to the decline in the ‘world's factory’ growth mode. Improving social mobility is vital for nurturing vibrant labour forces to achieve industrial upgrade and a balanced development mode. In this regard, the diversification of education and related local practices in SER restructuring impeded the new political–economic plan because it promoted the social reproduction of the middle and upper classes and thus reduced social mobility.
The above discussions indicate that, firstly, the central state has known the local practice in restructuring SER. Secondly, the educational institutional transformation in China is crisis-driven and trial-and-error; its embeddedness in and coupling with the political economy is not static and predesigned, but dynamic and contingent. Such findings echo Jessop's (2016) theory that the state is not a monolithic bloc and that institutional transformation is driven by the dyscoordination between a new accumulation strategy and previous institutions.
State strategical selection of market partners
Moreover, the market should not be viewed as a monolithic bloc. Studies on market-oriented education restructuring in the western contexts tended to understand it as a part of neoliberal restructuring which disempowered governments and empowered market actors/logic in social–economic activities. In the case of China's SER restructuring, although market actors were involved in the operation and provision of schooling, the states at both central and local levels have strategically selected certain market ‘partners’ for their political agendas. During the strategical selection process, their political power over the jurisdiction was consolidated rather than diminished.
In Chengdu, the market actors the municipality selected were its strategic partners in other fields and affairs. In Mianyang, the market actors the municipality selected were the state-owned education group. The prosperity of the education group strengthened the municipality's financial power to implement other political–economic projects (i.e. industrial park development). In Jiangyou, the municipality strategically selected the local leading developer for nurturing their patron–client relationship and thus the municipal power of executing an urban development strategy. At the national scale, although the radical reform has engendered the shutdown of schools purely owned and operated by private actors since 2021, state-owned for-profit schools, such as the schools operated by the education group in Mianyang, are not affected much. The reason is that these state-owned schools are an important part of the state capitalism, the prosperity of which is crucial to the party-state's dominance over the national economy and society.
Hence, the growing public–private partnerships in China should not be simplified as a neoliberalisation process. Instead, as Wu (2018) indicated, market instruments and actors are strategically selected and employed by the state to serve political goals, rather than vice versa. Jessop (2016) emphasised a heterogeneity of market actors and that governing socio-spatial transformation is a political process and plan of empowering certain social and market actors whilst disempowering certain actors. Multi-scale economic and political interests and goals are interweaved and negotiated to shape the local socio-spatial transformation (Jessop, 2016).
Conclusion
This study develops an inter-scale analytical framework foregrounding urban political economy to investigate the emerging and various SERs in urban China in the 2010s. We argue that the existing literature on SER restructuring has two key limitations. Firstly, scholars from different disciplines preferred different scales to develop a single-scalar analysis, among which urban scale has received less attention. This inadequacy has caused insufficient understanding of the interplay between SER restructuring and local socio-spatial transformation. Secondly, although the studies are based on the variety of capitalism approach unveiled the crucial role of SER in maintaining a national accumulation strategy and the productive logic underlying policy making on education, these studies have assumed an ideal and static coupling of education regime and territorial capitalism. The crisis-driven and evolutionary nature of capitalism and the downscaling of political economy under globalisation were largely ignored. Inspired by Lipman's (2004, 2007) seminal work that linked the extended functioning of school regime at the local scale (e.g. facilitate urban socio-spatial transformation), urban entrepreneurial strategy and national-scale political–economic transformation, we propose that (1) urban scale is a critical analytical scale that connects the macro-scale political–economic motivations driving local SER restructuring and its local politics and that (2) the function of SER restructuring in facilitating local socio-spatial transformation requires close examination along with the urban political economy that underpins this process.
Based on these arguments and by introducing variegated capitalism approach and multi-spatial meta-governance thesis, we develop an analytical framework with two key research questions proposed. This framework induces a shift of research concern from systematising the archetypal embeddedness of SER in stylised territorial capitalism to the multi-level, variegated and dynamic embeddedness of SER restructuring in political–economic transformation in the real world.
We answer the above research questions by examining three SERs emerging in three Chinese cities. Attention is paid to the role of SERs in facilitating local socio-spatial transformation and the political–economic motivations driving these processes. The empirical findings verify the actual function of a specific SER in attracting specific population and capital in certain places. In addition, the municipalities have proactively used this function to facilitate their spatial and entrepreneurial strategies. In Chengdu, the municipality established the public elite school to attract highly skilled labour and the super rich to develop the new industrial space and real estate economy. In Mianyang, the municipality developed the state-owned education investment group operating for-profit schools to stimulate the property-led land development and to gain additional fiscal revenues. The additional revenues were also used to finance the industrial park upgrade with an aim to foster a competitive electronics production cluster. In Jiangyou, the municipality collaborated with the local developer to develop a top-class private school to attract urban households to purchase the expensive suburban properties and to enhance the city's residential attractiveness to nearby rural households.
The above actions stem from China's changing accumulation strategy that created a new institutional environment driving the municipalities in different situations to take different spatial strategies to fix certain capital investment and population concerns. This change of national accumulation strategy is characterised by the shift of certain industries, capital and labour from eastern to western China to form a new production and trade network connected to new overseas markets. The serial policies following the new accumulation strategy have driven the western megacities to compete to be a new gateway city, medium-sized western cities to transform into a vibrant manufacturing city and small-sized western cities to upgrade their residential condition to attract rural population.
Notably, despite discretionary power decentralised to the municipality to use innovative SER to facilitate the political–economic transformation, the Chinese central government has preserved a large public school system maintaining a high level of investment into the elementary education sector. This maintenance aims to enhance China's overall labour competence to serve the industrial upgrading programme which is also a part of China's new national accumulation strategy (Zhang and He, 2020). To a certain extent, the empirical findings echo those of Holliday (2000) that in the east Asian developmental state, the welfare policy is created to facilitate economic policy and growth strategy. However, since the global economic recession in the 2010s, central governments in western countries have made continuous efforts to facilitate the formation of new spatial division of labour, industries and markets to stimulate the economy (Jessop, 2016). Whether and how the SER restructuring is involved in the state-mediated geographical processes of capitalist restructuring in other countries deserves investigation. This article therefore calls for greater attention to the multi-level and variegated political–economic embeddedness of SER restructuring in other countries amidst the ongoing world economy restructuring.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Dissertation Fellowship of Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (grant number DS-20202001-ZMZ).