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 twofold: 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.
The high-profile campaign, widely known as "Shuang Jian” in Mandarin, or "Double Reductions,” drove legions of tutoring companies into the red or into bankruptcy in some cases, and wiped billions of dollars off the market value of listed tutoring firms, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs.