Reverse gear and policy change: Processes of privatization and de- privatization in China

Private education may seem at odds with the conception of a socialist education system. Yet, since the early 2000s, China has been cautiously encouraging the establishment of non-state educational institutions. Officially, this has been motivated by pointing to the diversification of society and educational needs, and by depicting private schools as potential supplements to public education in cases of (temporary) lack of public schools; questions of social justice and educational equity have been largely omitted in this official discourse (cf. Schulte, 2018). Additionally, China has been witnessing a burgeoning economy of tutoring schools, a rather common phenomenon in educational systems characterized by high-stakes examinations.

Path-dependency models would lead one to assume that this development, once started, would push towards further privatization in China, which is also corroborated by the rising numbers of students enrolled in private institutions across all educational levels. However, two political decisions severely disrupted the anticipated process of further privatization: First, in late 2016, the Law of Promoting Private Education was amended and now forbids for-profit private schools during compulsory education. Second, in July 2021, the Ministry of Education published an “opinion” which led to a ban on for-profit tutoring in core subjects during compulsory education, resulting in a high number of bankrupt education companies and dismissed cram-school teachers, and met with despair by affected families.

The paper probes into the policy rationales behind these developments and examines the reasons as to why the current administration under President Xi Jinping has seemingly crunched into reverse gear in their approach towards private education. Rather than viewing the recent policy decisions as a simple break with previous policies, they can be interpreted, from a broader historical perspective, as attempts to reconnect with earlier, Maoist educational traditions. This interpretation suggests a cyclical rather than a linear process, and would thus be more accurately captured by the process sequencing model, which both allows for reversals in development and considers frictions an important source of endogenous change (cf. e.g. Howlett & Rayner, 2006). The paper will therefore highlight, on the one hand, the relevance of time frames and their directionality in empirical research when accounting for continuity and discontinuity; and, on the other hand, historical “paths” as both actual empirical developments and envisioned trajectories (similar to what Broschek has called the “institutional” and “ideational” layers; Broschek, 2010), as they are negotiated and (de)legitimized in interaction with social, economic, and political processes.