In this article I examine recent theoretical and empirical exchanges around partnership-based urban governance between North Atlantic and Chinese academics and policymakers. I argue that the latest wave of de jure private–public partnerships in urban China reflects an ongoing process of governance rescaling beyond conventional entrepreneurial urbanism theory. I propose an analytical framework that foregrounds successive experimental partnerships as tensions between institutional continuity and change arising from rescaling. In this study I examine variegated actually existing partnerships in Jiyuan, China, to identify generalizable ideal types of partnership-driven governance rescaling. I conclude by suggesting to enhance the theorization of entrepreneurial urbanism by specifying a partnership-scale nexus, and assert that variegated partnerships in China have rewritten the rule but not the law of partnership.