Supervisor: Fangsheng Zhu, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Student Researchers: Jiaming Xue (Class of 2026), Hanyang Zhou (Class of 2026)
About the Project:
In July 2021, the Ministry of Education of China announced a most ambitious campaign to reform education, known as Double Reduction (shuangjian). Deploying an array of policy tools, the campaign aimed at reducing academic pressure on the nation’s primary and secondary school students. One of the policies came as a surprise: a total ban on after-school academic tutoring from grades one to nine.
This ban shook China’s education industry. Before the reform, the industry had led the world in market valuation and had started exporting its services abroad. While this industry had a tech element, much of the industry’s revenue still came from tutoring. After the reform, many of the industry’s players shut their doors, and those that remained downsized to a fraction and had to restructure their businesses. As many of China’s education companies were listed in American stock markets, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “Wall Street Gets a Chinese Education.”
The year 2024 will be three years after the 2021 reform. It provides an opportune moment to examine the before and after of the education industry. Post-reform policies will have been fully enacted and implemented, companies will have come up with their new strategies, and families will have adapted to the new normal. In this project, I will investigate what had changed after 2021 about China’s education industry and the provision of tutoring services.
China’s education industry under Double Reduction provides a unique and important case study for China’s economic and social governance, two domains that increasingly intermesh. In the case of education, the ambitions of a thriving industry clashed with those of the government. What happens when a government prioritizes social goals over developmental ones? What intended and unintended consequences would occur? What lessons can we learn from this massive policy experiment? The team will collaborate and come up with answers for these questions, which would inform our understanding of ongoing changes in Chinese development and governance.
