Abstract: Over the past decades, Chinese parents have come to view private tutoring as a crucial tool to help their children succeed in an increasingly competitive educational and job market. The rapid growth of the private tutoring industry has generated criticism of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality, privileging students whose families have the financial resources to spend on supplementary academic lessons. In 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Education outlawed private academic tutoring to ensure educational equality for all students. This paper analyzes the private tutoring ban in China and evaluates whether the policy regulations achieve the intended goal of reducing inequality in the Chinese education system. This paper explores how educational inequality is produced by the decentralized school financing policies and hidden through discourses of fair and meritocratic standardized examinations. The paper then argues that China’s strategy of addressing inequality through banning private tutoring, without changing its policy decisions on school funding and standardized testing, renders its claims of promoting educational equity as insufficient and unserious.
Keywords: China, Education, Inequality, Youth
Introduction
Demand for private tutoring is especially prominent in East Asian societies, such as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, which feature intense competition and traditions of a Confucian culture that emphasizes the value of education and hard work.[1] In China, where entrance examinations function as narrow bottlenecks that the Chinese youth must pass through if they hope to reach the opportunities to move into the middle and upper classes, the private tutoring industry has grown significantly.[2] Supplementary classes after the formal hours of school have evolved to train students specifically in exam knowledge and test-taking skills.[3] This form of private supplementary tutoring is widely known as “shadow education” because it would not exist without formal education. Private tutors teach content that largely copies after content taught in school: as the mainstream curriculum changes, so does the shadow curriculum.[4]
In July 2021, after years of unchecked growth, the Chinese government launched strict regulations on the private tutoring industry to promote social equality.[5] One of the largest criticisms of private tutoring is that wealthy families can afford to buy their children educational advantages to succeed in school, and subsequently, in career opportunities. The “Double Reduction Policy” bans for-profit companies from tutoring in core curriculum subjects and forces remaining institutions to register as non-profits — which makes it impractical for them to operate.[6]
This paper analyzes the private tutoring ban in China and evaluates whether the policy regulations achieve the intended goal of reducing inequality in the Chinese education system. To do so, this paper will first explain how the high-stakes nature of entrance examinations generated an intense demand for shadow education and how the growth of the private tutoring industry has produced widespread criticism. In evaluating the ban on private tutoring against the wider context of educational inequality in China, this paper argues that the Double Reduction Policy is ineffective in ensuring equal and fair educational opportunity for students: it does not rein in the processes of the Chinese education system that restrict opportunities for poor working-class students. Thus, this paper posits that the Double Reduction Policy is an unserious attempt at tackling educational inequality and obscures the root causes that disadvantage students from poor and low-income families from securing quality education and opportunities for upward mobility.
Shadow Education and Educational Pressure in China
Today, upward mobility in China is increasingly determined by educational attainment: those with only a junior high school or vocational education cannot compete with university graduates for white-collar or professional jobs.[7] The Chinese education system features two entrance examinations that control access to higher education: the Grade 9 High School Entrance Examination (Zhongkao, or HSEE) in which junior high school students compete for entry into senior secondary education, and the Grade 12 University Entrance Examination (Gaokao, or UEE) in which senior high school students compete for entry into tertiary.[8]
The HSEE is, therefore, a critical bottleneck that the individual must pass through to access a wider range of educational and professional opportunities. Crucially, a student’s HSEE score determines whether or not they can enter a senior high school.[9] If they do score highly enough to enter a regular high school, their HSEE score determines the quality of the school they can attend, which subsequently influences the student’s chances for later succeeding in the UEE.[10] If students fail to attain the minimum score required to qualify for senior high school education, their opportunities significantly decrease.[11] While students from wealthy families can buy entry into private secondary schools or pursue a high school education abroad, the remaining students who cannot afford a private school or extra studies are effectively shut out of the Chinese academic educational stream.[12] They can pursue technical or vocational programs, but these students cannot access public academic education beyond Grade 9 and are ineligible to take the UEE in the future.[13] Thus, for students who fail the HSEE, their futures are largely determined by their family’s economic resources: those who cannot afford private academic education are left to industrial, agricultural, or low-end service jobs.[14] They are effectively prevented from attaining higher-paying occupations and moving upwards into the middle-class.[15] As a result, there is intense pressure to perform well on Chinese entrance examinations: in determining entry into senior high school education and the subsequent opportunity for university education, the HSEE score effectively opens or closes the door to socioeconomic success.[16]
Due to the high-stakes examination structure of the Chinese education system, academic education has grown to become hyper-competitive.[17] With almost all prospects of pursuing white-collar or professional careers dependent on one’s performance on a single test administered at age sixteen, parents sought to ensure and consolidate educational advantages for their children, which included private training schools, tutors, and extracurricular classes for students whose families can afford it.[18] These anxieties have led to a transformation of how supplementary tutoring is perceived: rather than supporting students who have difficulty keeping up with their classes, Chinese parents are viewing after-school classes as a resource that optimizes test scores and ensures their children an advantage in the highly competitive university admissions.[19]
Despite the significant parental demand, China’s shadow education industry has long been a target of widespread criticism.[20] For students, additional schedules of extracurricular lessons on top of their standard school days impose heavy academic burdens on students. Chinese students study 55 hours per week on average, ranking first among the 79 countries that participated in OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018.[21] With inadequate time for sports and play, psychologists and others are wary of the negative impact of the additional supplementary classes on students’ physical and mental health, relationships, and creativity.[22] For teachers and education administrators, shadow education has led to negative and disruptive repercussions on school classes. One reason is that the syllabus in the shadow is often inconsistent with the formal syllabus in schools – tutors may teach the content ahead of the schools and lead students to become bored during school classes.[23] Another concern is that as students choose and pay their tutors, students may respect their authority more than their school teachers, who are imposed on them without choice or charge.[24] At the same time, many private tutoring companies hire in-service school teachers.[25] When school teachers are also private tutors, they may problematically reserve their energies and content for private lessons.[26]
However, the largest criticism of shadow education is that it exacerbates social inequalities. When academic success becomes largely dependent on how families mobilize economic, social, and informational resources in the shadow, it effectively dispossesses the educational prospects of students from lower-class families who cannot afford private supplementary education.[27] Wealthy families can afford more and better tutoring services, and these investments directly translate into entrance examination performance, entry into elite institutions, and subsequent lifelong earnings.[28]
The Double Reduction Policy: A Critical Analysis
The existence of shadow education stands in direct contradiction to the meritocratic principles that the Chinese state promotes. By granting a direct advantage to those who can afford shadow education, it creates an educational inequality that taints the state’s depiction of the high school and university entrance examinations as fair and meritocratic processes.[29] Entrance examinations are supposed to represent equal and open contests that fairly award opportunities according to the student’s talents and work ethic – not according to their family’s ability to pay for their supplementary training in test-taking.[30]
Upon a critical analysis of the implications of the Double Reduction Policy, however, this paper argues that the ban on shadow education is an unserious attempt at addressing educational inequality in China. In examining how the ban on shadow education does not address the root causes of inequality in education in China, this paper argues that banning shadow education does not reduce the advantage gap between the poor and the wealthy but instead hurts the middle class the most. Then, this paper will identify two educational policies implemented by the Chinese government that sustains educational inequality and further heightens the opportunities for advantaged classes to enter key universities.
The overhaul of the industry of private tutors and supplementary classes were meant to reduce what the Chinese government saw as inequality in the education system. However, rather than closing the inequality of opportunity between students from high-income and low-income households, it has instead led to the creation of a black market that further concentrates resources in the hands of the wealthy.[31] Richer families pay to work around the restrictions of private tutoring, including hiring teachers to move in full-time at the family home as nannies. At the same time, tutors who are willing to keep working illegally are raising their fees.[32] Because students from poor households already lack the resources to access private tutoring, the primary policy implication is that middle-class children will fall further behind, as their families cannot afford the luxuries of hiring private tutors in secret or inviting former tutors to move in with as live-in helpers.[33] The ban on shadow education does not reduce the educational inequalities between the rich and the poor – rather, it further concentrates advantages on the wealthy and strips the middle-class children of the means to keep up.
To investigate the root causes of educational inequality that the ban on private tutoring does not address, this paper identifies two intentional policy decisions made by the Chinese national government that continue to exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities. First, the decentralized education financing policy worsens geographic economic disparities and systematically provides urban students with a leg up in entrance examinations and university admissions. Second, the HSEE admissions failure rate systematically creates an underclass of youth that are locked out of socioeconomic success and sorted into the working class.
Decentralized Education Financing
Before the decentralization reforms in the 1980s, China had a centralized public financing system in which the national government administered a complete collection and complete distribution of tax revenues from lower-level governments.[34] This meant that education was financed according to national distribution, which included resource transfers from richer to poorer regions.[35] Since the 1980s, however, China has introduced a decentralized tax system characterized by the practice of feng zou chi fang (eating from separate pots).[36] This practice required the government at each level to be responsible for financing its social services, which includes education.[37]
While the decentralization reforms created incentives for local governments to invest in economic activities, these changes have emerged amidst rapid economic growth that created increasing large disparities between the urban and rural provinces.[38] The decentralization of finance and the privatization of costs in education exacerbated urban-rural inequality in funding for schools: richer provinces have greater budgets for their schools and invested in more and better resources that poorer provinces are unable to afford.[39] With lesser funding for teacher salaries, facilities and materials in the countryside, studies concluded that children residing in coastal urban areas benefit from educational expenditure four times more than those in the rural interior.[40] The decentralized education finance policy confers a clear educational advantage to students residing in wealthy urban regions and leads to the structural exclusion of poor rural students in higher education. This is most evident in the disproportionate gap in admissions and enrollments between urban and rural students in China’s top universities.[41] Through the decentralized education finance policy, students from urban areas such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai (areas that have the highest funding for education resources) sustain their geographic educational advantages and further heighten their opportunities to enter key universities and attain greater economic rewards.[42]
HSEE Failure Rate Policy
The Ministry of Education imposes a set failure rate that requires a given percentage of the nation’s youth must fail the HSEE. The pass rate varies year-to-year, but the overall national HSEE pass rate has remained at roughly 50 percent since 1993.[43] The important point is that, regardless of how worthy they may be as students, half the nation’s youth are doomed to fail this exam and channeled into the limited opportunities in vocational and working-class careers.[44] The HSEE is designed to ensure 50 percent of students will fail, yet students who fare poorly are blamed for their failure and are assumed to be wholly responsible for the inferior non-academic path they are locked into.[45]
Despite the HSEE cut-off policy requirement, the state continues to depict the HSEE as meritocratic: the exam is presented as a fair and open contest that separates talented and hard-working students from those who are “lazy” and deemed to have low academic potential.[46] Thus, the exam is popularly understood to measure not just the academic acumen of teenagers, but also, their moral character. By sorting students into binary categories of successful students who passed the HSEE, and the “failures” that did not make the cut-off, people regard scoring poorly as a sign of both intellectual and moral lack and blame students for being “stupid”, “lazy”, or not working hard enough.[47] Rather than holding accountable the government institutions responsible for implementing the fail-rate policy and pre-determining that half the test takers must fail the exam, failure to qualify for high school and university education is always attributed to ‘individual failures of will or ability’ rather than the institutional authorities that design the policies that limit access to senior high school and university education. When the students are entirely blamed for their academic failures and for losing their chance to achieve upward mobility, it follows that the entire working class deserves its status.
Conclusion
As private supplementary tutoring evolved into a resource that optimizes academic performance and consolidates educational advantage for those who can afford it, the Chinese state has recognized that shadow education creates an uneven playing field between students of different socioeconomic statuses. With shadow education directly contradicting the meritocratic ideal of awarding students opportunities according to their diligence and talents – and not their families’ ability to mobilize economic and informational resources, the Chinese government introduced the ban on private tutoring.
However, in evaluating the criticism of shadow education against a larger contextual outlook of the Chinese education system, this paper finds the government’s ban on private tutoring ineffective in reducing the educational inequality that it claims to resolve. As the Chinese government continues to implement policies of decentralized education financing and high school entrance examination failure rates, it will continue to exacerbate social inequality and prevent low-income and rural students from accessing quality education and opportunities. Coupled with a state-mandated limit on university admissions, the disparities between urban and rural educational expenditure are serious: it directly replicates and sustains social inequalities in higher education opportunities, giving already advantaged classes heightened opportunities to enter universities and attain economic success.[48]
Thus, this paper concludes that the Chinese government’s restrictions on the private tutoring industry are unserious and unsatisfactory efforts to reduce educational inequality. Unless the state reverses its policy positions on education financing and HSEE admissions pass rate – policies that are most responsible for putting students from low-income households at an educational disadvantage, it is perhaps more accurate to regard the ban on private tutoring as an attempt to preserve the facade of a fair and meritocratic education system.
Nicole Shi is a fifth-year undergraduate student currently studying Contemporary Asian studies, Political Science, and Philosophy. Her research interests are lies in the intersection of equality of opportunity and education. Through her work with Synergy, she hopes to promote discourse on the role of education in realizing social ideals, and a deeper understanding of the structural inequalities and power differentials within education systems in Asia today.
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[2] Terry Woronov, “Class Work,” in Class Work (Stanford University Press, 2015).
[3] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[4] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[5] Yinan Xie, ed., “The General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Issued the ‘Opinions on Further Reducing the Burden of Homework and Off-Campus Training for Students in the Compulsory Education Stage’ – Government Portal of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China” (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, July 2021), http://www.moe.gov.cn/jyb_xxgk/moe_1777/moe_1778/202107/t20210724_546576.html.
[6] Helen Davidson, “China’s Crackdown on Tutoring Leaves Parents with New Problems,” The Guardian, August 3, 2021, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/03/chinas-crackdown-on-tutoring-leaves-parents-with-new-problems.
[7] Terry E. Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China,” in Handbook on Class and Social Stratification in China (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016).
[8] Woronov, “Class Work.”
[9] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[10] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[11] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[12] Terry E. Woronov, “Learning to Serve: Urban Youth, Vocational Schools and New Class Formations in China,” The China Journal, no. 66 (2011): 77–99.
[13]Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[14] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[15] Woronov, “Learning to Serve: Urban Youth, Vocational Schools and New Class Formations in China.”
[16] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[17] Robert Kirkpatrick and Yuebing Zang, “The Negative Influences of Exam-Oriented Education on Chinese High School Students: Backwash from Classroom to Child,” Language Testing in Asia 1, no. 3 (2011): 1–10.
[18] Yu and Ding, “How to Get out of the Prisoners’ Dilemma: Educational Resource Allocation and Private Tutoring.”
[19] Haiping Xue, “Why Time’s Up for China’s ‘Shadow Education’ Industry,” Sixth Tone, August 7, 2021, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008175/why-times-up-for-chinas-shadow-education-industry.
[20] Xue, “Why Time’s Up for China’s ‘Shadow Education’ Industry.”
[21] Yingyi Ma, “Why Do Chinese Students Study in the U.S.?,” The Washington Post, December 17, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/17/chinas-education-system-produces-stellar-test-scores-so-why-do-students-head-abroad-each-year-study/.
[22] Jaesung Choi and Rosa Minhyo Cho, “Evaluating the Effects of Governmental Regulations on South Korean Private Cram Schools,” Asia Pacific Journal of Education 36, no. 4 (2016): 599–621.
[23] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[24] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[25] Zhang, “The Demand for Shadow Education in China.”
[26] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[27] Zhang and Bray, “Micro-Neoliberalism in China: Public-Private Interactions at the Confluence of Mainstream and Shadow Education.”
[28] Zhang, “The Demand for Shadow Education in China.”
[29] James Palmer, “Why China Is Cracking Down on Private Tutoring,” Foreign Policy (blog), July 28, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/28/china-private-tutoring-education-regulation-crackdown/.
[30] Ye Liu, “Meritocracy and the Gaokao: A Survey Study of Higher Education Selection and Socio-Economic Participation in East China,” British Journal of Sociology of Education 34, no. 5–6 (November 1, 2013): 868–87, https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.816237.
[31] Wanly Chen and Rachel Cheung, “The Hidden Victims of China’s Ban on After-School Tutoring,” Vice (blog), June 2, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmyy8/china-bans-after-school-tutoring.
[32] Wenxin Fan, “Who Says No Tutors and Less Homework Is Bad? Many Chinese Parents,” WSJ, January 15, 2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-war-on-shadow-education-leaves-parents-in-distress-11642160733.
[33] Chen and Cheung, “The Hidden Victims of China’s Ban on After-School Tutoring.”
[34] Emily Hannum and Meiyan Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China,” China Economic Review, Symposium on Inequality, Market Development, and Sources of Growth in China under Accelerating Reform, 17, no. 3 (January 1, 2006): 253–65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chieco.2006.04.003.
[35] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[36] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[37] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[38] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[39] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[40] Tony Bush, Marianne Coleman, and Si Xiaohong, “Managing Secondary Schools in China,” Compare 28, no. 2 (1998): 183–95.
[41] Chris Hamnett, Shen Hua, and Liang Bingjie, “The Reproduction of Regional Inequality through University Access: The Gaokao in China,” Area Development and Policy 4, no. 3 (July 3, 2019): 252–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2018.1559703.
[42] Hannum and Wang, “Geography and Educational Inequality in China.”
[43] Philip Fang, “One Test Labels 30 Million Chinese Kids Failures. That Must End,” Sixth Tone, October 8, 2018, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003007/one-test-labels-30-million-chinese-kids-failures.-that-must-end.
[44] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[45] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[46] Woronov, “The High School Entrance Exam and/as Class Sorter: Working Class Youth and the HSEE in Contemporary China.”
[47] Fang, “One Test Labels 30 Million Chinese Kids Failures. That Must End.”
[48] Hamnett, Hua, and Bingjie, “The Reproduction of Regional Inequality through University Access.”