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With a contact book full of teachers and parents eager to give their children the best chance, business is booming for tutor Elaine, despite repeated closures, fines and ongoing government crackdowns.
Two years after the government first squeezed the for-profit education company, business is “growing very fast,” Elaine said. She asked that her Chinese name not be used. “We have been reported several times. The authorities received the report, but the punishment was very light.
“More and more parents realize that after-school training and tutoring still exist, and if they don’t use it, their children will fall behind,” added the agent from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Xi Jinping’s government is trying to reduce the money advantage in a competitive education environment where a top university degree is crucial for getting into high-paying jobs.
China’s so-called double reduction policy aims to limit homework and extracurricular tutoring and make it illegal to teach core subjects such as Chinese, English and math outside of school for profit from 2021. In cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, however, parents have found a way.
China’s for-profit tutoring industry, once dominated by U.S.-listed Chinese companies, employing hundreds of thousands of people and valued at tens of billions of dollars, has splintered into a black market where brokers and tutors liaise with parents privately.
“For the middle class, they find solutions, very localized solutions that are invisible to outsiders,” said Julian Fisher, co-founder of Risk Education, a market intelligence consultancy in Beijing. “It’s impossible to say how common it is because no one talks about it anymore.”
Given that children may have to switch to career paths based on their secondary school test results, there is still enormous pressure. “Imagine the fear of God in many families . . . for the past 20-30 years they’ve been avoiding life in the factory or the field,” Fisher said.
The government has issued multiple notices this year, including a State Council order in March, saying it would “continue to enforce” the policy, but in big cities the tutoring services it is trying to ban make little practical sense. Difficult to access.
“Recently, I have a feeling that everything is back to the way it was before,” said a parent in Shanghai whose child is in high school. “But those agencies were constrained by regulations, so they no longer exist.”
The parent said the government cracked down on tutoring “in the name of fairness” but “gradually turned a blind eye” as the underground market flourished.
Today, tutoring services are often coordinated through groups on WeChat, China’s main social media platform, and tutors often work directly from their homes or centers, potentially obscuring their teaching when inspected.
“The demand is crazy,” said an English teacher in Shanghai, adding that he earns about 400 yuan ($56) an hour for tutoring, and whenever he visits students at school, the practice “ Usually it spreads.” Residential area.
“If someone sees you in an elevator, they’re like, ‘What are you doing here?’ You say ‘coaching,’ and you’re like, ‘What are you doing next week?'”
The teacher also works at a center where any potential inspector “could clearly see it was a classroom” because “all our visas are on the wall”.
“It’s something I’ve always found a bit weird. It’s illegal, but they’re definitely trying to operate legally,” he said. “I’m not really digging into the problem.”
The boss of a tutoring agency in the wealthy eastern city of Hangzhou said teachers sometimes rent different training venues to avoid detection. Online courses are also very popular.
With so much secrecy surrounding tutoring, Fisher gave the example of a powerful parent in Beijing who sent his kids to different places each time. The young man was then taken to a mysterious tutoring location without either of them being informed.
Like what it is trying to fight back, public attitudes to the policy itself are hard to gauge. Fisher said parents would agree the policy was a “good thing” because the previous situation was “unsustainable”. Since the program launched, he has seen more and more children playing in his compound in Beijing after school.
The 2021 policy reverberated internationally because it eliminated parts of the operations of large companies, highlighting the vulnerability of the private sector in an environment of highly centralized control.
For the Xi Jinping government, the purpose of the crackdown is to appeal to the domestic population, but in terms of implementation, it is sometimes unclear what the government’s true intentions are.
In Shenzhen, Elaine is relieved by the occasional checks by the authorities. “They have kids,” she said. “After they come to us for inspection, they sometimes come back later to try to find a mentor.”