China’s tutoring crackdown has created a black market

Meaning:A fathom is six feet of water — the unit sailors used when they dropped a weighted line over the side to find the bottom — and to fathom meant to measure that depth. The word kept the idea and lost the water: to fathom something now is to get to the bottom of it in your head, to work out something puzzling by thinking it through. It almost always carries a hint of effort or bafflement, which is why you meet it most often in the negative — I can't fathom why he did that. Here the writer is being dry: the effect is so obvious that a couple of economics lessons would be more than enough to fathom it.

Meaning:Skittish means nervous and easily spooked — ready to jump, bolt, or clam up at the smallest hint of trouble. It started with horses, and the picture is still a horse shying at a plastic bag blowing across the path; people and even markets get the word, and financial writers use it constantly (investors turned skittish) for a crowd ready to sell on the first bad headline. In the article the tutors are skittish for a concrete reason: what they are doing is illegal, and the stranger who has just walked onto the ninth floor could be a parent or could be an inspection team — so they answer carefully and insist they teach only classic English plays.

Meaning:To bedevil something is to plague it with trouble that keeps coming back, so the thing limps along and never quite works — not one clean disaster but a steady drip of problems. There is a devil sitting inside the word, and that is the image it carries: something small and persistent making mischief. Journalists reach for it for projects, policies and seasons that never come right — delays bedevilled the stadium's construction, injuries bedevilled the team. In the article the 5+2 scheme was a sensible plan that never got the money it needed, and that shortage has bedevilled it city by city, turning time meant for sports and arts into supervised homework.

In China a fifteen-year-old sits an exam that decides which high school will take them, and three years later another one, the gaokao, that largely decides which university will. Not an application with essays and recommendations and a coach's letter — a test, scored, ranked, and a cut-off line. Education policy calls this high-stakes testing: a single assessment whose result, on its own, hands out something scarce and life-shaping.

Why would a country build that? Start with the arithmetic. Far more people want a place at a good university than there are places, so some rule has to decide who gets one. An exam, marked by someone who does not know whose paper it is, is the rule that is hardest to bribe and hardest to inherit — which is exactly why such systems were invented. Imperial China ran one for more than a thousand years to pick its officials, and that fairness argument is still the main defence of the gaokao today.

The cost sits on the other side of the same coin. When one number does all the deciding, every hour that might raise that number becomes a rational purchase. That is where the article's twelve-hour study days come from, and the cram schools, and the burnout — and it is why banning the tutoring does not touch the reason for the tutoring. The idea travels well beyond China: whenever a single measurement controls who gets something scarce, expect enormous effort to pile up around that measurement, and expect someone to start selling it.

Haidian is the Beijing district where the leading universities and the big tech firms are, and the families there are already high earners. You might expect them to be the relaxed ones. They are the most frantic parents in the country, and not because they are chasing a step up — what drives them is the fear of sliding back down.

Social mobility is what economists and sociologists call the degree to which a person's place in society can differ from their parents'. It is a measurement, not a mood: researchers line up every family in a country from poorest to richest, then look at where those families' children land twenty or thirty years later. If a child born into the poorest fifth has roughly a one-in-five shot at each rung, mobility is high — where you started tells you almost nothing about where you finish. If that child nearly always stays in the bottom fifth, mobility is low, and the country's rankings are close to hereditary.

Two things follow that are easy to miss. First, measured this way the rungs are always full, so mobility runs both directions: a child who climbs past someone is a child someone else slipped below. The Haidian parents have worked that out, which is why money and effort look to them like defence rather than ambition. Second, low mobility and high inequality are different complaints — a country can have big gaps between the rungs, or a sticky ladder, or both — and a tutoring race makes the ladder stickier by pricing the extra lessons out of reach of the families who would gain most from them. So when you next read that somewhere is "the land of opportunity," you know what would actually settle it: not how rich the top is, but how often children finish on a different rung from the one they started on.