According to Sliwka (2008), alternative education refers to approaches of teaching and learning that are different from state-provided mainstream education. Recently, some discontent Chinese parents have opted for alternative types of education for their children, which include homeschooling, Classics Reading schools, and underground Christian schools (Xu & Spruyt, 2022). As a niche choice outside of mainstream education, providers of alternative education constantly face the challenge of attracting enough participating families. This requires them to prove their capability to cater to the specific needs of prospective families (Maguire et al., 1999). This is especially relevant in the Chinese context, which is characterized by high-stake exams, fierce educational competition (Howlett, 2021), and authoritarian educational governance (Schulte, 2018). This also raises the question of how these alternative schools present themselves to the public and position themselves in the Chinese educational system. In this research, we study one special type of alternative education, i.e., parent-innovative schools in China. We adopted the (dis)connection framework put forward by Kraftl (2013). According to Kraftl (2013), alternative learning space is a negotiated process that incorporates multiple forms of connections and disconnections with different mainstream institutions. School websites, brochures, and promotional materials are widely used by researchers as important sources to study how schools advertise themselves and argue for their legitimacy (Wilson & Carlsen, 2016). In this research, we conducted a qualitative thematic analysis based on the online promotional materials provided by five innovative schools in Beijing. Our analysis revealed the paradoxical efforts of the Innovative schools in negotiating their ‘alternavity’. By advocating for ‘individualized education for every child’, they seem to challenge the mainstream logic that focuses on competition and success. However, they are responding to the new educational demands of the urban middle class and winning themselves a survival niche in another way. While these schools highlight their humanistic educational beliefs in opposition of the utilitarian and exam-oriented mainstream schools, they also adopt some mainstream criteria unconsciously to argue for their legitimacy. More interestingly, while these innovative schools try to align themselves with the national educational agenda, their rhetoric also indicates the potential noncompliance of social elites. Through such negotiation, these schools manage to gain certain autonomy in an authoritarian context, and this phenomenon also sheds light on the struggle between control and autonomy for middle-class parents in post-socialist China.

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