5 years after sweeping ban, China’s tutoring industry still bleeding parents dry
Five years ago, China imposed a sweeping ban on for-profit academic tutoring. But the sector has quietly made a comeback amid intense parental demand
Yin Yue, a mother with a 15-year-old daughter, feels like after-school academic tutoring is everywhere again in Guangzhou, the city where she lives in southern China.
In Guangzhou’s shopping malls, these centres are now among the busiest tenants, pulling in crowds of parents and schoolchildren on weekends and weekday evenings, according to Yin. During the summer and winter holidays, they sometimes get so busy that nearby shops and restaurants see an uptick in business.
That would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago. In 2021, Beijing launched its “double reduction” campaign to outlaw for-profit tutoring in core school subjects such as maths and English, aiming to stamp out an academic rat race that was leading parents to spend eye-watering sums on extra classes for their children.
Yet the crackdown did not dampen the intense competition in the country’s education system – or the demand for extra tutoring that it feeds. And that has allowed the industry to gradually make a comeback, aided by a pause in intensive, high-profile national clampdown campaigns.