ABSTRACT
In recent decades, scholarly attention has been drawn to spatial differences, particularly with regard to the role of urban centres as cores of educational development and modernisation. However, study on the sub-parts of this topic has proceeded more or less in isolation, in the various academic disciplines of consumer theory, political science, sociology and history. In the case of China, fragmentation of this topic has been aggravated by governmental policies, which have added an additional dimension to the relationship between urbanisation and education. In this chapter, we make a start in combining the various disciplines by systematically discussing the relation between urbanisation and education in multiple political periods. Our findings are, first, that academic fragmentation has persisted over time, with the exception of the 1949–1978 period when research was dominated by political scientists. Second, in terms of both the definition of urbanisation and the topics of research, the Reform Period represented a resumption of the path that was set in during the Republican Period that followed the 1949–1978 interlude.
