“Equity” and “Quality” have been mentioned many times in this reform of China’s education system (Yu, 2020; Qian and Walker, 2020). However, there has been an increasing recognition that it is hard to achieve these two goals only by relying on a school’s individual strength. Policymakers, therefore, turned their eyes on the whole “system” changes (Qian and Walker, 2020). The reform of the entire system involves the improvement of all schools in the system, usually focusing mainly on narrowing the gap between high-performance and low-performance schools (Hopkins et al., 2014). School-to-school collaboration is regarded as an effective way to raise the standard of regional education systems, reduce the gap between schools and facilitate the redistribution of resources in Chinese context (Du and Duan, 2020), and education collectivisation is one of the widely practiced forms of school-to-school collaboration. Many scholars have conducted research on the purposes and achievements of education collectives (see Wu, 2013; Gu et al., 2017; You, 2021; Liu, 2021 et al.), yet there is little acknowledgment about its differentiated forms, thereby it is important to unpack this complexity. To fully map the education collective’s terrain, I first answer the question that what do education collectives in China look like and how can they be conceptualised? I then elucidate a description of the typology of education collectives. I employ the metaphor of Chinese landscape painting to inform my overall approach and methodology. Further, I borrow the concept of three distances in Chinese landscape painting to structure this typology. The different dimensions of typologising education collectives mainly concern legal status, power relations and external engagement. This research innovatively uses metaphor of Chinese landscape painting and its characteristics to reveal the complex terrain of Chinese education. This typology helps to place education collectives within the broader landscape of Chinese compulsory education and system reform, provides a foundation for understanding network and partnership diversity among inter-school collaboration, and offers insights about classifying education collectives of other education systems.

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