Three waves of schooling marketization in urban China amid changing political economy since the 1990s

Schooling marketization is a global syndrome characterizing post-1980 societies. However, while many studies have examined the political economy and politics of schooling marketization in Western economies, China’s schooling marketization remains insufficiently understood. Moreover, the existing studies have the analytical tendency to fall into the trap of methodological nationalism, with an exclusive focus on the state restructuring under neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization, leading to schooling marketization being viewed as a static and locally homogeneous practice. This paper fills these gaps by developing a city-level and time-sensitive analysis of local practices of marketizing the urban schooling system in the post-reform age. Two cities in western China—Chengdu and Mianyang—are taken as cases for comparative analysis. We found three waves of schooling marketization in urban China that are driven by the changes in the political economy between the 1980s and 2010s. Through a cross-fertilization of the outward-looking approach to geographies of education and geographic political economy, we understand China’s schooling marketization as a state-mediated institutional transformation that is employed to serve the local economic restructuring/time-varying urban growth strategy, which is staged by the changing (inter)national political economy.