While China embraces disability inclusion rhetorically, segregated special schools continue to proliferate in recent decades. What kind of space are special education schools? How do actors in such spaces negotiate stigma and marginality for a better future? This research pairs historical, policy and ethnographic research to examine special education schools as transient spaces of marginality and potentiality in China. It illustrates how inclusion needs to go beyond the entanglement with place towards "relationality" and "being."