Schooling marketization and entrepreneurial urbanism : making new mobility, space and urban politics in Chinese cities

Abstract

China’s market-oriented reform has not just engendered intensive marketization of land and housing, but also of education, specifically the primary and secondary formal schooling. Since the 1990s, education sector in China has experienced a transformation from a pure public school system to a mixed provision-regulation regime. The state is no longer the single provider of formal schooling. Various private companies and profit-making organizations are introduced to open and operate schools. Despite the maintenance of a large public school system providing cheap schooling, growing number of profit-making schools are developed to provide expensive and quality schooling. The households, particularly the middle class and above are no longer passive receivers of standard public schooling, instead, they are the proactive consumers of quality schooling along with the rise of open enrollment. But what drives the marketization process of formal schooling in China and what are the sociospatial consequences remain unclear. This thesis seeks to answer these two questions by engaging with two established theories from human geography. One is the British regulation school’s (Jessop, 1999; 2014) theorization of the nexus of state(institutional) transformation, geographical process (sociospatial transformation) and crisis-driven evolutionary capitalism. The other is Thiem’s (2009) theorization of an outward-looking approach to the geographies of education that considers how the external effects of education restructuring connect to social, political and economic processes under neoliberal globalization. Inspired by the two theories, this thesis critically reviews the mainstream approach to education restructuring developed by sociologists and political scientists with identifying the weaknesses including (1) the inadequacy of local/urban scale analysis, (2) time-insensitivity and (3) the lack of reflective thinking. In response to these limitations, this thesis develops a fourfold reconceptualization of education restructuring to consider how education restructuring is caused by and contributes to the state-mediated process of de-territorialization, re-territorialization and reorganization of capital, labor and population to facilitate accumulation process/search for new accumulation strategy with the (re)production of sociospatial inequality. Firstly, education restructuring is considered as a state-mediated, locally heterogeneous institutional transformation that is employed to serve the local economic restructuring/time-varying urban growth strategy, which is scaled by the changing (inter)national political economy. Secondly, marketized education is considered as economic goods attractive to consumers/investors which engenders/contributes to the mobility of population and capital. Thirdly, education restructuring is considered as a tool employed by the state to facilitate the concentration of certain capital investment and population in certain place. Fourthly, education restructuring is considered as a locally embodied process producing variegated externalities on local society, which is therefore shaped not just by top-down political-economic motivations but also by bottom-up resistance. The fourfold reconceptualization is substantiated by taking Sichuan, China as a case study. This province has deeply involved in China’s drastic political-economic transformation and experienced a fast education restructuring during the past three decades, which provides applicable conditions to examine the research questions. By doing so, this thesis contributes a new perspective to understand China’s contemporary entrepreneurial urbanism characterized by growth-oriented governance and intensified sociospatial inequality. It also advances the social geographies of education by using China’s experiences in education restructuring to contributes to the epistemology of the mechanism of geographic process under neoliberal globalization.