 China, the most populous country in the world and one of the biggest economies, has a massive education sector. According to reports, the nationwide student enrolment in the kindergarten to class 12 segment are projected to grow from 325.3 million in 2019 to 659.5 million by 2024. China's education sector is also extremely competitive and this has led to the growth of a huge private tutoring sector, which has also become highly profit driven. This has attracted the attention of regulators who in July decided to crack down on this sector for the benefit of students and parents. How is the private tutoring sector grown over the years and what are the reasons? What has been the government's response and what is its impact? Things Chuck of Dongsheng News explains. I think one of the big legislative changes this last year was the regulations on the private tutoring industry. I think for your listeners to get a sense of why the private tutoring industry became something that needed to be regulated was that China's education system is quite meritocratic. It's very test heavy. The Gaokao, which is the university entrance exam is one of the most stressful periods of any child's life and what that created was basically a system of private tutoring that became kind of a home style based private tutoring grew into these large companies that were trying to help kids catch up or in the end it became to get ahead of the school curriculum. And what happened was in July of this year the Chinese government made an announcement that they were going to reel in on this private tutoring industry or what's called the double reduction cost. The double reduction being they wanted to simultaneously reduce the pressure on school children especially this competitive nature of schooling and then also the financial burden on parents because what has happened is in order for kids to catch up or families you know the pressures for their kids to catch up it means that you have to pay for these additional services and of course this is really reserved for those who are you know coming from well off upper middle class middle class families or or families are even getting indebted to that. And so the private industry just to give you a sense of how large they're grown is that from the 1990s it started emerging and the first company was actually lost that listed in the New York Stock Exchange in 2006 so about 15 years ago and that was New Oriental and in those last 15 years it has ballooned to a hundred and twenty billion dollar industry with over 300 million Chinese students enrolled in these private tutoring sectors and it got to a point where the government actually came in the Ministry of Education came in and called it a sector that has been hijacked by capital and so this we can see as being part of a series of measures that has been trying to reel in these excesses of capital in certain industries like in private education but we've also seen similar kinds of activities in you know the big tech sector and around monopolistic practices. The crackdown on private tutoring and the larger approach to education has been part of an understanding of common prosperity that is sought to address inequality and bridge gaps between various sections of the population. How is education being viewed in this context? What concrete benefits do Chinese students get as part of this new approach? How are their day-to-day lives affected? I think that's one of the kind of buzzwords of the year common prosperity and I know that I think in English it can sometimes sound mysterious so maybe just step back a bit about what common prosperity how to originate. I think there's two ways of describing what common prosperity means the first being it's kind of a more of a concept that has a long tradition in Chinese history philosophy and politics just around you know the common good and sharing the social wealth of the society with all but in the socialist period since the creation of People's Republic of China in 1949 common prosperity has been used by leaders like Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping to talk about how basically socials construction particularly in the period of Deng in the opening up and reform period the idea of developing the productive forces rapidly and which we saw after 1978 was also not just about economic development but it was also about how to improve the livelihoods of people so this quick fast sustained pace of economic growth has to have a social consequence and but of course what we saw is that you know during this period of rapid economic growth there were also serious contradictions we saw increased inequality in China not only between the rural and urban areas but also between regions like between the western more privileged regions with the eastern more developed regions we saw the you know the what it's called now the three mountains that are being faced by a particular working families is housing healthcare and education costs have really skyrocketed and so this not what we're seeing as common prosperity is sort of the next stage in the economic development phase and this is part of a series of cycle reforms that the government is starting to put in place is to basically balance how do you look at a sustained economic growth while strengthening some of these welfare mechanisms whether it's now there's huge discussions on tax reforms whether it's real estate inheritance income taxes etc it's looking at how to strengthen social security and where the education component comes in is around this recognizing that education inequality has to be addressed so we can see the crackdown on the private tutoring industry as part of the aims of achieving common prosperity and so we've actually seen this as a part of many measures I mean one of I actually live in Shanghai and I overlook a middle school and one of the things that I really notice because not only is it to reduce this sort of after school sort of test-driven tutoring system but it's also to increase for example arts and sports education so you actually see even in the school system how much more sports education is being encouraged to because it's about you know improving the the minds and the health the physical health and the mental health of kids as well so that's one thing that we've been really seeing but beyond that they're also looking at also the teachers one of the things is that the teacher salaries in the public education system has been lower than the private sector and especially many of the teachers have been attracted by this private private tutoring industry so there have been new commitments to increasing teacher salaries and also this really interesting pilot programs because Chinese society is one that really you know tests and experiments with with policy before implementing on a national scale and we've seen two pilot programs just recently implemented that are quite interesting one is actually to do a system of where the the talk teachers and principals of the public schools are put into a rotation system so that they get to work for a period of time in schools across this entire city that's one of the ways of trying to sort of balance or or at least make more available the top teaching resources which sometimes you know are related to okay the elite of the top public schools are in the areas where real estate speculation is high and the real estate prices are high so they're trying to address these multiple factors at the same time so what is this teacher rotation pilot program and the second just came out now is that they're actually trying to create an online platform now that's a free platform a government platform in Beijing to offer free tutoring to students now so this is one of the ways to sort of address the fact that there are still parents who are looking for additional support for students but now is not under sort of the private capital profit-driven motive so they are starting to do that pilot and they're going to be implementing that across the schools in Beijing by the end of next year