Schooling as urban asset: Education, capital and governance in entrepreneurial Chinese city

This paper examines how schooling is being reconstituted as a strategic urban asset in contemporary China. Moving beyond its conventional role as a public good, elite education is increasingly mobilised within a model of education-led entrepreneurial governance. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a public–private school partnership in a peripheral Chinese city, the paper develops an analytical framework at the intersection of educational neoliberalism, entrepreneurial urbanism and the geographies of urban infrastructure, centred on the strategic coupling of three actors: elite educational institutions possessing mobile brand capital, real estate developers seeking symbolic anchors for value creation, and a local state acting as critical facilitator, operating through mobility, hybrid partnership and institutional mediation. The analysis shows how the symbolic capital of schooling is assembled with private investment and state coordination, and converted into property premiums and social-symbolic legitimacy for the project, while political-regulatory legitimacy remains a state monopoly the developer can neither produce nor purchase; the two are hierarchically ordered, and the alliance generates new forms of socio-spatial inequality. We conceptualise this process as the assetisation of schooling, in which value rests on the capitalisation of expected future advantage rather than direct sale. The study draws on polymorphous statehood to show how state entrepreneurialism in peripheral contexts operates through delegated coordination and policy ambiguity, and how such alliances remain inherently fragile, advancing a relational account of how public goods are reworked into value-bearing urban assets and offering a critical lens on urban governance in China and beyond.