Delivery time2023-07-21 17:56
Bloomberg “The craze for middle-class private education in the first summer vacation after China’s ‘With Corona'”
Hong Kong media “Chinese young people seek Dinks due to skyrocketing childcare and private education costs”
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(Hong Kong = Yonhap News) Correspondent Yoon Go-eun = It has been two years since China began cracking down on the $100 billion (about 130 trillion won) private education market, saying it would ease the burden on parents, but Bloomberg News diagnosed on the 21st that it had the opposite effect of only increasing the black market.
As a result of interviewing several parents in Shanghai and Shenzhen, Bloomberg reported that after the authorities cracked down on the private education market, many households’ private education expenses actually increased, especially during this summer vacation, the first vacation after the COVID-19 quarantine was lifted.
At the same time, parents who want their children to gain an advantage in academics are looking for the expensive private education market that is spreading like crazy all over China.
In July 2021, Chinese authorities implemented the Shuangjian policy, which eases the burden of homework and tutoring on elementary and middle school students, to reduce the burden on the family economy and prevent the indiscriminate expansion of capital, and then strictly regulated private tutoring.
As a result, after-school private education for essential subjects, including English academies, was banned, most of the related companies and academies were closed, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs.
However, it is pointed out that China’s private education market will not disappear as long as the ‘Gaokao’, a university entrance exam that 10 million people apply every year, exists.
Gaokao is a ladder for rising social status, and entering a good university usually means getting a good job.
According to what a Bloomberg reporter witnessed in a commercial building in Shanghai’s Jing’an District on a recent weekend, after-school classes for mathematics and Chinese (Korean) were in fact held up with signs such as ‘thinking’ or ‘literature and linguistics’. The tuition for these lessons was 300 to 500 yuan (approximately 53,000 to 90,000 won).
In particular, many instructors, who previously held large-scale lectures at large private academies, drastically reduced the size of lectures to avoid crackdowns and, in many cases, offered one-to-one lectures.
Sera Wang (40) from Shanghai said, “As her only daughter in the fifth grade now has to take private lessons for difficult subjects such as physics, the cost of private education has increased by more than 50%.”
“Our burden hasn’t eased at all,” he said, comparing the competition to get into good schools to “thousands of troops and horses trying to cross a single-wood bridge.”
Cathy Zhu from Shanghai also revealed that her son’s math academy fee is almost double the previous amount of 300 yuan per session.
“As long as high school and college entrance exams exist, goals such as reducing private tutoring can never be achieved,” he said.
Parents are complaining about not only the high school fees, but also the difficulty of finding good instructors. This is because public information about the instructor has disappeared due to the crackdown by the authorities.
Authorities allow some large-scale online lectures, which are much cheaper but less popular. This is because many middle-class parents feel that these types of lectures cannot provide their children with a proper education.
Bloomberg pointed out, “In a city like Shanghai, annual private education expenses (per family) now easily exceed 100,000 yuan (about 17.9 million won).
“It is analyzed that young people in China are increasingly avoiding marriage and childbirth due to rising child support and soaring housing prices amid a slowing economy,” he said.
As China’s crackdown on private education marks its second year this month, several local authorities have stepped up their crackdown on private education.
The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, reported that the Hefei authorities in Anhui Province conducted 77 raids on private education institutions in one day on the 28th of last month.
It also added that many private education companies that violated the regulations held up false signboards such as ‘education consultation’ in hotels or apartments and conducted subject lectures.
In this situation, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that many young Chinese people are pursuing “Dinks” (Double Income, No Kids) who do not have children due to skyrocketing child support and private education expenses.
The newspaper analyzed that there was a tendency among Chinese people to refuse to become parents due to economic burdens even before Corona 19, but the experience of job loss, lockdown, and economic uncertainty for three years of ‘Zero Corona’ intensified such a tendency.
“In China, many young couples are avoiding government subsidies or incentives to live a life free from the burden of having children,” he said.
China’s population declined last year for the first time in 61 years. Last year, the number of newborns was 9.5 million. It is the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 that the number of newborns in China has fallen below 10 million.
Report via KakaoTalk okjebo
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2023/07/21 17:56 Sent
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2023-07-21 08:56:41
