Xi Jinping and the Pandora’s box of private online tutoring

One day in March 2021, three major Chinese private tutoring companies online —New Oriental Education, TAL Educativo Group and GSX Techedu— lost between 13% and 15% of their value on the New York Stock Exchange, where in the year since the start of the pandemic they had not only started trading, but also risen in value to make its largest shareholders billionaires. News of its plummeting was surprising, but not nearly as surprising as its previous rise, considering that many investors were looking with a mixture of suspicion and skepticism that Chinese private-tuition companies online will be listed on Wall Street.

The immediate reason that explained the stock market punishment was the decision of the Chinese Government to regulate the business of these education companies online forcing them, to begin with, to register as non-profit companies. In addition, heavy fines were imposed on some of them for alleged financial irregularities and misleading advertising. At the end of July, the market value of these Chinese companies had lost three quarters (from 100,000 to 24,000 million dollars, according to The New York Times), which in turn caused widespread declines in the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets. Not long after, came China’s ban on private tutoring. online, which was described as a “national problem” and also important restrictions on video games. But one thing is video games and quite another math, science and language classes both to reinforce and enrich student performance. How did President Xi conclude that the runaway business growth of these companies was a national problem? What lies beneath a story that almost sounds like educational science fiction?

The story begins with the great popularity in China of Apps education since before the pandemic. The official Chinese policy at the time was that homework could only be given to students from the third grade onwards. But the climate of competitiveness in the Chinese educational system is such that the teachers themselves advise parents of options online so that the little ones also did homework regularly. What could already be considered an extreme situation before the pandemic exploded with this one: the awareness that school closures implied a loss of learning and, therefore, of opportunities made the demand for private classes online Will trigger; and all this in line with the official policy of digitization of the educational system, that is, with schools and teachers actively demanding the creation of new applications online and its growing use in schools when returning to the classroom after confinement. Pandora’s box had been flung wide open.

The change of course decided by Xi could be explained by three reasons: first, the acceleration of digitization led to a disorderly growth of large private tutoring companies online, that the Government understood that they were parasitizing the public education system to the point of virtually kidnapping it, while widening educational inequality. Second, Chinese companies had become multinationals, increasingly involving US and foreign investment funds. For Xi, this implied a risk that his geopolitical rivals would end up influencing and even controlling the education of Chinese primary and secondary students. At a time when China is moving towards more recentralization and more control in the hands of the Communist Party and its leader, the market evolution of these companies was unacceptable.

But the third explanation is perhaps the most important: demographic projections predict a drop in the Chinese population of up to 720 million inhabitants in 2100. Hence the aggressive birth policy focused today on the third child. Some estimates suggest that Chinese families have doubled their investment in their children’s education as a result of the pandemic. The drift created by the demand for private tutoring is at the root of this increase and the Government understands that it discourages families from having more children. In a society accustomed to putting all the family’s investment effort into a single child, the success of the new birth policy therefore depends on eliminating this great obstacle. The forcefulness of the measures being taken attests to this.

The first information (from South China Morning Post, for example) that come after Xi’s crackdown suggest families are turning to a nascent black market for private tutoring, with Taiwanese and Singaporean companies, as well as Western ones, available to the richest. for learning English and in English. Will Xi be able to close Pandora’s box? Bets are allowed.

John Manuel Moreno He is a full professor of Didactics and School Organization at the UNED.

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