A Study of Education Public Private Partnership (PPP) Projects in China

Public Private Partnership (PPP) has been applied in public procurement globally for over 30 years. Within the PPP model, a cooperation between public and private sectors is established to provide public infrastructure or services (Kwak et al., 2009). PPP has been widely adopted by many countries because of its attractive features of transferring risks to the private sector, reducing public sector administration cost, solving the problem of government budget constraints, providing higher quality public products and services, and saving project delivery time (Li et al., 2005). As the largest developing country in the world, by the end of 2022, about 14,000 PPP projects have been registered in the Chinese national PPP project library (Chen, 2023). Education, as an important public good or service, has traditionally been provided by the public sector in China. The application of the PPP model in China for delivery of a range of traditional public goods offered up the possibility of PPP being used as an alternative route for education provision. This study aims to investigate the application of PPP model in the Chinese education sector by conducting in-depth qualitative case studies of Chinese education PPP projects. Documentary analysis and semi-structured interview were adopted as the main data collection methods in the case studies in order to obtain in-depth data from specific projects. A policy review was undertaken to systematically review the key PPP-related and education PPP-related policies in China to ascertain the general pattern of Chinese PPP policy development as well as to assess that policy’s impact upon the development of the Chinese PPP and education PPP at regional, municipal, and project levels. This study finds that the development of education PPP in China is at an early stage and there is a gap between the conceptual basis of PPP and its application in practice. These findings are interpreted through the dual lenses of Policy Transfer Theory and Stakeholder Theory.