Pursuing social justice through education policy programmes: capturing subtleties with a modified welfare regime analysis

Social justice is a central concern for societies worldwide, and governments frequently design education policies to advance it. While research has examined the forms and extent of educational inequities, it has paid less attention to how equity-oriented policies are shaped by historical and contextual factors, especially regional diversity within a single nation. This paper analyses welfare policy interventions in education in two Chinese cities – Beijing and Hong Kong — and explores how their distinct socio-cultural settings influence public views of education as a public or private good. Drawing on a welfare-regime perspective combined with Nancy Fraser’s notion of social justice, it offers a new approach to understanding equity-oriented education policies, based on 21 policy programmes. Findings show that both cities employ a direct, centralised approach typically associated with a conservative model, yet their sociopolitical contexts generate divergent strategies. Beijing operates a conservative-productivist regime, using centralised redistribution to advance distributive justice while subordinating recognitive and participatory aims to collectivism and political stability. Hong Kong’s conservative-neoliberal regime delegates redistribution to school-level market mechanisms, expanding recognitive coverage but sustaining class-based barriers to participation. It closes with suggestions for disadvantaged students and contributes to wider debates on the need for context-sensitive frameworks of social justice.