School regime restructuring in Western China: From archetypal to multi-scale and variegated political–economic embeddedness

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.