China: Parents turn to black market for private lessons – 06/23/2023 – Market

With a contact book full of the names of private tutors and parents interested in securing the best opportunities for their children, tutoring agent Elaine is working around the clock, despite repeated closures, fines and constant government crackdowns.

Two years after the government began cracking down on for-profit education companies, the movement “is growing very quickly,” said Elaine, who asked that her Chinese name not be used. “We have already been denounced several times. The authorities were informed, but the punishment was very light.

“More and more parents realize that private tutoring still exists and that their children will be left behind if they don’t take these lessons,” said the agent, who works in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

In a highly competitive educational environment where degrees from the best universities can be essential for entering industries that pay well, the Xi Jinping government has been seeking to reduce the advantage guaranteed by purchasing power.

Since 2021, China’s so-called double reduction policy has sought to limit students’ homework and private lessons outside of school hours. The teaching of core curriculum subjects such as Chinese, English and mathematics outside of school and for profit has been prohibited by law. But in cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, parents manage.

China’s paid tutoring industry, once anchored by large Chinese companies listed on US exchanges that employed hundreds of thousands of people and were valued at tens of billions of dollars, has fragmented into a black market in which agents and teachers Individuals negotiate personally with parents.

“Middle-class people find local solutions that are invisible to outsiders,” commented Julian Fisher, co-founder of Venture Education, a Beijing-based market intelligence consultancy. “It’s impossible to say what the dimensions of this are because nobody else comments.”

This year the government has issued multiple warnings, including a State Council decree issued in March, that it will continue to implement the policy. In big cities, however, there is no perception that the tutoring services that the government wants to ban are difficult to access.

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

According to this mother, the government has cracked down on private tuition in the name of equal opportunities for all, but as the black market has grown, it is “little by little turning a blind eye.”

Today tutoring services are often coordinated through groups on WeChat, China’s largest social platform. Teachers teach students in their homes or work in places that can disguise their activity in the event of an inspection.

“The demand is huge,” commented an English language teacher in Shanghai. He says he earns around Rmb400 (US$56) per hour for private tuition and that practice often spills over when he goes home to teach a student in a residential building.

“If someone sees you in the elevator, they ask ‘what are you doing here?’

The teacher also works in a center where any potential inspector “could clearly see that it’s a classroom” because “all of our visas are pinned to the wall.”

“That’s something I’ve always found a little strange,” commented the professor. “It’s illegal, but the centers are trying to operate legally. I don’t ask too many questions.”

The owner of a private tutoring institution in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou said teachers sometimes rent different places to work to avoid being caught. Online classes are also very popular.

So great is the secrecy surrounding tutoring that Fisher cited the example of a powerful father in Beijing who drops his son off in a different place each time for tutoring. The teenager is then taken to a third location, which neither he nor his father had been informed about, to receive the lesson.

As the very practice that government policy seeks to combat, public attitudes towards it are difficult to gauge. Fisher suggested that parents would likely agree that the policy is a good thing because the previous situation would have been “untenable”. Since the policy was adopted, he has seen more children playing after school in his Beijing condominium.

The policy adopted in 2021 gained international attention because it ended the operations of large companies, highlighting the fragility of the private sector in an environment of strong centralized control.

For the Xi government, the aim of the crackdown was to please the Chinese domestic public. But when it comes to putting policy into practice, it’s not always clear what the government really wants.

In Shenzhen, Elaine doesn’t worry about the occasional inspection. “Inspectors have children,” she said. “Sometimes, after coming to inspect us, they come back later to try to find a tutor.”

Translated by Clara Allain