China’s tutoring crackdown has created a black market

The academic system has become more unfair but just as pressure-filled

THE INSPECTION team barged in as business was in full swing. An official confronted the front-desk staff, a cop snapped photos of incriminating evidence, an investigator questioned customers. Next, they got inside the computer system, scoping out prices paid and services rendered. Finally, when it was all done, the authorities in Huiyang, a southern city, posted a video of the sting, set to stirring music. For this had been a raid on a most dangerous scourge: an after-school tutoring centre. Heaven forfend children study even more maths!

Across China, authorities have staged similar raids. Inspection teams in Inner Mongolia and Hubei have posted their own videos. Others have taken a different tack, naming and shaming: in Changsha they released the addresses of 113 illicit tutors. Many have adopted disguises. One father in Beijing pretends his son attends a calligraphy school (permitted) when in fact he is studying for the maths olympiad (discouraged). Wealthy families now hire “guidance counsellors” to aid their children, an expensive and illegal workaround.

In this way, striving students, anxious parents and earnest tutors have become unlikely members of a quasi-criminal underworld, one devoted to exam preparation. It is a revealing—and for many in China maddening—saga about the shortcomings of public policy, especially against deep-seated social patterns. The government may mean well in trying to ease academic pressure. But the results have been a lesson in unintended consequences.

The crackdown began in 2021 when the government launched its “double reduction” policy, aiming to reduce both off-campus tutoring and homework for long-suffering students. Something had to be done: Chinese children can spend 12 hours a day on academic work, cutting into sleep and exercise, not to mention fun. Burnouts are common as students approach entrance exams for both secondary school and university. The government’s restriction on off-campus training is not a blanket ban. Parents can continue to send their children to ballet or coding classes. But for-profit tutoring of core subjects, from science to history, is prohibited.

Five years on, the results are visible. China’s academic industrial complex has been wrecked. Listed companies such as New Oriental and TAL—the biggest cram-school brands—lost nearly 90% of their market value, wiping out about $100bn. They have since pivoted to adult education and non-academic tutoring. Nevertheless, as shown by the raids on smaller tutoring businesses, and even individual instructors, the demand for extra studying has not vanished. It has been pushed underground and into new channels.

On a recent weekday afternoon, Chaguan visited a cluster of tutoring centres in the east of Beijing. Most were tricky to find: they no longer advertise online or post signs. But word of mouth is powerful, especially when a tutor gains a reputation for being effective. On the ninth floor of a nondescript business tower, the tutors in one office were skittish. They said they taught only classic English plays (allowed as a cultural course), not English for the sake of boosting test results. On the sixth floor, a tutor admitted she did something expressly prohibited: skipping ahead of the curriculum, by teaching third-grade concepts to second graders. “If this is what parents want, we do it,” she said.

It does not take many extra lessons in economics to fathom one effect: a restricted supply of tutoring has run into demand that is still buoyant, pushing up prices. Mr Gao, the father who sends his ten-year-old son to maths posing as calligraphy, pays 20,000 yuan (nearly $3,000) per semester for that plus an English class. “In the past, when everyone was in tutoring, prices were relatively affordable and competition happened inside school. Now, it comes down to whose family has more money,” he says. There has also been an arms race in those extra-curricular classes that are permitted. The mother of a girl in kindergarten says her five-year-old now has French classes three times a week, as well as vocal training, dance, gymnastics and boxing.

The swot SWAT team

Tiger parents certainly are a problem. In Beijing, people hold special contempt, tinged with envy, for the extreme academic competition in Haidian, a district home to leading universities and tech firms. Since families there already have high incomes, their appetite for tutoring is motivated less by dreams of upward mobility than by fears of downward slippage. Yet some researchers have found lower-income families place heavier academic pressure on their children. Mr Gao’s analysis is simple and compelling: “Everyone’s doing it. You have no choice but to join in, too.”

Officials know that a ban alone will not kill demand. So they are trying to create an alternative in a 5+2 model, in which children remain in school for two hours past the end of classes, closer to the end of parents’ workdays. Schools are meant to use the added time to provide enriching programmes: some academic review but also sports and arts. A lack of funding has bedevilled the rollout. In many cities it has devolved into supervised homework time. And with children in school for two hours longer, parents feel more urgency to squeeze in tutoring.

The root of all this is the ultra-competitive nature of Chinese life. Alas, the belief that extra education is the best way up—or the way to avoid falling back—is entirely reasonable: plenty of the parents now sending children to tutors went through the same grind and saw the impact. Perhaps pressures will lessen as China gets wealthier, or as a shrinking population eases the dog-eat-dog job market. Yet that day has not arrived. The cram schools, when they existed, may not have sparked joy. But they were widely accessible. What is left is more unequal, and it makes scofflaws of many who just want the best for their children. ■