Drawing on empirical materials detailing the development path of Jiyuan, a small city in Henan province, this paper revisits the concepts of urban entrepreneurialism and glurbanisation to provide new insights to understand China's diverse trajectories of urbanization and their connection with two simultaneous processes of globalization and localization. This study is organized around the following questions:To what extent can we capture the evolving entrepreneurial endeavor of Jiyuan, a small city in middle China, under the framework of "Urban Entrepreneurialism"? How do these endeavors evolve, along with the upgrade of both the city's administrative level and its position in the urban hierarchy? In which ways are its strategies and trajectory distinct from many other large cities along the east coast of China, such as Shanghai and Guangzhou? In this paper we apply an explicit and simplified definition of urban entrepreneurialism-namely, the development of three indispensable elements, including entrepreneurial fashion, entrepreneurial discourse and entrepreneurial strategies-to interpret Jiyuan's evolving urban development strategies and trajectory of the past more than 20 years. From the late 1980s to most recent, urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan has experienced three phases' development, from germination, to exploration to amplification, in the meantime moving-up its administrative level. As a multi-scalar process, urban entrepreneurialism in China is shaped by the interaction between the city, the region, the state and the globe under the confluence of globalisation and marketization.