Unveiling the Secret Weapon: Chinese Private Tutors Make a Comeback Amidst Parental Panic about Children’s Lagging Progress!

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With a contact book full of teachers and parents desperate to give their children the best opportunities, tutoring broker Elaine makes a roaring trade, even in the face of repeated closures, fines, and persistent government repression.

Two years after the government first pressed for-profit education companies, business is “growing very rapidly”, said Elaine, who asked that her Chinese name not be used. “We have been reported several times. The authorities were notified, but the punishment was very light.

“More and more parents are realizing that after-school training and tutoring still exists, and their children will fall behind if they don’t use it,” the Shenzhen-based broker added in the southern China.

Xi Jinping’s government has sought to reduce the money advantage in a fiercely competitive educational environment where the best college degrees can be crucial for entering high-paying industries.

The so-called double reduction policy in China aims since 2021 to limit after-school homework and tutoring and makes it illegal to teach core curriculum subjects, such as Chinese, English and math, outside of school for profit. In cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, however, parents are finding a way.

The country’s for-profit tutoring industry, once anchored by US-listed Chinese companies that employed hundreds of thousands of people and were worth tens of billions of dollars, has splintered into a black market where agents and guardians liaise privately with parents.

“For the middle classes, they’ve found solutions, very local solutions that are invisible to anyone on the outside,” said Julian Fisher, co-founder of Venture Education, a Beijing-based market intelligence consultancy. . “It’s impossible to say how widespread it is because nobody talks about it anymore.”

Strong pressures remain in place as children may have to move into a vocational route depending on college exam results. “Imagine the fear of God that has been imposed on many families. . . who have spent the last 20 to 30 years fleeing life in factories or fields,” Fisher said.

The government has already issued several notices this year, including a decree from the Council of State in March, indicating that it will “continue to implement” the policy, but on the ground in major cities there is little makes sense that the tutoring services it seeks to ban are difficult to access.

“Recently, I felt like things were back to how they were,” said a parent from Shanghai whose child is in high school. “But the institutions are limited by regulations, so they’re not there anymore.”

The government, the parent said, cracked down on tutoring “in the name of fairness”, but as the underground market flourished, it “gradually turned a blind eye”.

These days, tutoring services are often coordinated by groups on WeChat, China’s leading social media platform, while tutors often teach students directly from their homes or work in centers that may disguise their content as instruction in the event of an inspection.

“The demand is just crazy,” said an English teacher in Shanghai, adding that he earned around Rmb400 ($56) per hour from tutoring and the practice “usually sort of spread” each time. that he was visiting a student at his home. residential complex.

“If someone sees you in an elevator, they’re like, ‘What are you doing here?’ You say ‘tutoring’ and it’s like, boom, ‘What are you doing next week?’

The teacher also works at a center where any potential inspector “could clean like day sees here a classroom” because “all our visas are on the wall.”

“It’s something that I’ve always found a little strange. It’s illegal, but they’re definitely trying to operate legally,” he said. “I’m not really going to look for questions.”

The owner of a tutoring facility in the wealthy eastern city of Hangzhou said teachers sometimes rented different training venues to avoid detection. Online courses were also popular.

The secrecy surrounding tutoring is such that Fisher cited the example of a very powerful Beijing parent who dropped off his child in a different location each time. The youngster was then taken to a mysterious tutoring location neither of them had been told about.

Like the practice it seeks to counter, popular attitudes toward the policy itself are difficult to gauge. Fisher suggested parents would agree the policy was a “good thing” because the previous situation was “not sustainable”. He has seen more children playing after school near his Beijing compound since his introduction.

The 2021 policy has found international resonance due to its role in erasing part of the operations of large companies, highlighting the fragility of the private sector in a highly centralized control environment.

For Xi’s government, the lens of the crackdown was instead designed to appeal to a domestic audience, but when it comes to enforcement, it’s sometimes unclear where the heart of the government really lies.

In Shenzhen, Elaine is relaxed about the occasional inspection by authorities. “They have children,” she said. “After they visit us for an inspection, they sometimes come back later to try to find a guardian.”