Regional studies have found significant agglomeration effects of education development on economic growth. Regional favouritism is potentially closely related to public investment in education, further impacting regional growth. This paper provides significant empirical evidence on the potential impact of favouritism on education development in the Chinese context. Using data for 282 Chinese cities from 1996 to 2016 with treatment for endogeneity (Lewbel two-stage least squares estimator), the results provide evidence that Chinese provincial political leaders favour their birthplaces’ education resource development, and that the effect is larger for within-provincial impact and higher tier cities ranked by income.