State Corporatism and Public-Private Partnership in China’s Basic Education

• In Event: The Subnational Turn (I): Decentralization and Political Economy

Abstract

China’s recent social policy reforms have promoted a bounded model of public-private partnership that emphasize “state guidance, societal participation” in social sectors (Shii 2017; State Council 2017). In the education sector, however, earlier market-oriented reforms have created various forms of profit-seeking public-private partnerships (PPP) that include “public system, private assistance” and “private system, public assistance”. Despite recent top-down pressure to impose stronger state control in the education system, these PPP institutions have become deeply institutionalized and “embedded” locally. Through comparative case studies of cities in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, I show that the local state corporatism contributed to the persistence of these market-oriented PPP models through coordination with local schools, real estate developer, state-owned and private firms, as well as industrial parks. The political logics of local state corporatism therefore are deeply intertwined with the productivist economic logics to create path dependent patterns in the basic education system.

Author

• Xiaoye She, California State University at San Marcos