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China education
OpinionComment
Alice Wu
Alice Wu

Opinion | Teaching tutoring centres a lesson won’t get to the root of Chinese students’ stress

  • While President Xi Jinping is right to focus on the problems in the education sector, cram schools are only the tip of the iceberg
  • Reform of the gaokao system is key to ending the unhealthy over-reliance on after-school tutoring

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A Chinese high school student studies late at night for the annual college entrance examinations, in Handan, Hebei province, in May 2018. Photo: EPA-EFE
Alice Wu
Beijing is cracking the whip on the mainland’s cutthroat tutoring market by introducing tighter regulations. At the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference meeting in March, President Xi Jinping described the country’s market for after-school training services as a “social problem”, noting that “the disorder among tutorial centres is an entrenched malady” and called for “all social aspects and related departments” to join hands to solve the problem.
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It’s not news that the education sector – especially off-campus education that starts from kindergarten and runs all the way up to grade 12 – is ridiculously lucrative.

Yes, the off-campus education sector has taken a huge hit due to the Covid-19 pandemic because these centres have not been allowed to hold in-person classes for a long time. Last year, Yousheng Education Technology, a major tutorial chain with 1,200 teaching centres and a 20-year history, shut down and was unable to offer refunds to most parents.

It isn’t the only one to have collapsed overnight, and this isn’t the first time the central government has tried to rein in the industry. Reform has been discussed for decades; the last time the after-school education sector faced the wrath of the government was in 2018.

This time, the clampdown will reportedly focus on business qualifications of after-school tutors, false advertising and overcharging, as well as certain subjects and where and when classes can be held.

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Turning education from an honourable profession into a business focused on profit with little regard for students’ real needs deserves public scorn and government intervention. The question is, what intervention is needed to address the problem?

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