Jing Cao, Vincent Wee
Against the backdrop of global competition for academic talent and cross-border research influence, global city strategic positioning has become a critical upstream driver shaping the competitiveness of local international higher education. As China’s capital with the designated “Four Centers” positioning, Beijing owns unique political, technological, cultural and diplomatic agglomeration advantages that distinguish it from other domestic metropolises. Existing research mostly separates urban planning research and university internationalisation analysis, lacking quantitative empirical tests on the transmission mechanism linking multi-dimensional city positioning to educational competitiveness. This study constructs a structural equation model based on Friedmann’s World City Hypothesis and resource agglomeration theory. Taking Beijing’s 34 Double First-Class universities as the research object, it collects mixed questionnaire and 2020–2025 archival data to test the direct effects of four urban functional positioning dimensions and the mediating role of higher education resource agglomeration. The results show that political-diplomatic positioning exerts the strongest positive direct impact, followed by sci-tech, cultural and talent exchange positioning; higher education resource agglomeration presents universal partial mediation across all paths, and obvious heterogeneity exists among different university types. This paper enriches non-Western global city educational research and provides differentiated urban-education coordination strategies for Beijing’s municipal authorities and institutional administrators.