In July, 2021, the Chinese government took an axe to a $120-billion domestic industry: the private after-school tutoring companies that provided English lessons to Chinese children and teens over the internet. With little warning, businesses that offered such services were ordered to shut down. Thousands of Chinese citizens who had been employed in running these schools unceremoniously lost their jobs. So did tens of thousands of American, Canadian and British ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers who had been teaching Chinese children online, sometimes for many years.
Most people in the west never heard about this deliberate dismantling of an industry that served millions of Chinese youngsters. Indeed, most westerners probably weren’t even aware that the industry had existed, even though prominent online language companies such as New Oriental Education & Technology Inc. and TAL Education Group were listed on US stock exchanges. Their stock prices fell abruptly in late July and have since flat-lined at about 5 percent of their former value.
I have two friends who were employed teaching ESL by a Chinese tutoring company when the axe fell. They’ve mentioned to me a little-known phenomenon about the industry: namely, that many friendly cross-border relationships were formed during the years that the English-speaking teachers worked for the Chinese companies. The teachers got to know and like many of the Chinese managers who offered them extra gigs such as making promotional language videos for potential customers, or training new teachers.
Westerners also got to know their regular students, some of whom they would see two or three times a week. Occasionally they would speak to the students’ parents, who sometimes hovered in the background during their children’s lessons. Western teachers learned that Chinese parents aren’t much different from themselves in wanting what’s best for their kids.
More importantly, however, the Chinese children got to meet and develop affection for their western teachers. For many, it was probably the only opportunity they had ever had, or ever will have, to meet an American, Canadian or Brit and find out that they can be friendly and caring. My friends say that lessons often ended with students and teachers drawing hearts for each other on their electronic whiteboards.
The official reason given by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the sudden termination of these companies is that overly competitive parents were spending so much of their incomes on tutoring that they were compelled to restrict themselves to having fewer children, contrary to the wishes of the party.
China abandoned its one-child policy in 2015, and has now woken up to the fact that its population is aging and may soon start shrinking. In May, 2021, it began encouraging people to have three children instead of the previous limit of two. But If Chinese parents feel compelled to keep up with the Zhangs by spending lavish amounts of money on tutoring, it doesn’t necessarily follow that making tutoring unavailable will result in the production of more children. It might just mean that Chinese kids, still only one or two to a household, will be outfitted with fancier bicycles, designer clothing, or braces on their teeth.
I suspect that the CCP is being disingenuous about its reasons for clamping down on tutoring. I think the real reasons are twofold.
First, given the extremely oppressive COVID lockdown measures that China has imposed recently on its own people, I suspect that the CCP doesn’t want tens of thousands of westerners having the opportunity to peer daily into the living rooms of Chinese families, where they might learn the nature and extent of the privations. They don’t want millions of Chinese children divulging to their American and British tutors, for instance, that they have been locked into their apartments by iron chains placed on the outside of the building, and that they haven’t got enough food inside to eat. This was reportedly the situation in Xi’an, a city of 13 million people, just a week ago.
Secondly, given the hostile - even warlike - posturing that China has engaged in recently with respect to Taiwan, the CCP doesn’t want its youth to think fondly of the American or British people whom they might someday soon be called upon to kill. Governments invariably vilify their enemies during wars, casting them as sub-human foreign devils. It would undermine the state’s credibility if its young people were thinking, “But wait - my western tutors were all really kind and helpful. I don’t want to kill them.”
English has been a mandatory subject for Chinese school children for many years, in recognition of the importance it has in the global economy. Chinese parents apparently agreed, and wanted their kids to have whatever advantages supplementary lessons could offer. Whatever the CCP’s real reason was for abolishing private English tutoring, it’s a retrograde step for Chinese youth.
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That's interesting. All part of an ongoing war?