China’s $100 Billion Tutoring Ban Backfires, Spawning Black Market
- Crackdown was aimed at easing overwork and burgeoning costs
- Middle-class parents say tutoring fees have risen around 50%
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President Xi Jinping’s attack on China’s after-school tutoring industry was meant to ease the burden on households. But for many middle-class families, those efforts have had the opposite effect.
In July 2021, the government launched a sweeping clampdown on its private tutoring sector, banning them from providing for-profit classes on school curriculum subjects. The objective was two-fold: easing the burden on families, including overworked students and parents struggling to pay tuition, and curbing what it deemed “disorderly expansion of capital” in what had become a $100 billion education industry.