China’s underground tuition industry raises concerns of high costs, quality among parents

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Parents say the demand for one-on-one tutoring has gone up, resulting in a further shortage of teachers.

CHONGQING – Finance executive Zoe Pan used to spend 300 yuan an hour on her only son’s tuition classes, but she now shells out 150 yuan more, following a government ban on tutoring in 2021 that was meant to ease the costs of raising a child.

“But we can now rely only on word-of-mouth communication - mainly from other parents - to find out about tutors, or sign up for tuition classes that have been repackaged to avoid authorities’ detection,” she added. The move upended the US$120 billion industry, which officials said then was causing parents anxiety about making sure that their child was not lagging behind classmates.

But three years on, parents said they had been forced to turn to the black market tuition industry to help their child get ahead. Other media reports also noted that tuition classes were currently conducted illegally in nondescript buildings, with the authorities in Guangzhou city, the capital of southern Guangdong province, releasing on Aug 23 examples of how tuition classes were still happening illegally and the punishments meted out. They warned offenders not to contravene the ban.Offenders were made to refund parents, and fined between 12,038 yuan and 110,820 yuan, the Guangzhou authorities said.

“Sometimes classes would be held in a classmate’s home, or a commercial space,” she said. “Once, we had to travel out to the suburbs to attend a two-hour Mathematics class and come back to the city where we live,” she said.But things stabilised in 2023, after China lifted its Covid-19 restrictions, and Mrs Cheng’s daughter now attends weekly classes at a fixed venue, with cases of raids less heard among parents.

 

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