It is again another example of superficial interpretation of what's happening in China.
Benefits of for profit off school tutoring of core subjects like Chinese literature, math, English have been debated for a lot time in China by educators, academics and government officials. And there were study and theories that those tutoring have no link to actual academic benefits. There were such studies in China, Germany, Korea and many other countries.
For profit k-12 tutoring companies have been using all means to drive up parents' anxieties of fearing their children to be left behind if not to take the courses.
And because of fierce competitions, most smaller k-12 tutoring companies couldn't survive and they often make a big sales push to collect as much tuition, as much as tens of thousands of RMB per child before they close and run. It happened so many times that media lost interest in them.
Chinese government always plays heavy hands in market. This is no different. But the decision itself isn't as simple and sensational as to boost child birth.
If you're opposed to banning this on an ideological ideal of freedom that's one thing I certainly empathize with, but I honestly think this will greatly benefit overachievers at the relative détriment of middling students.
The admission numbers are not changing because of tutoring, so all of it was zero sum game waste. And a huge burden on parents and children themselves.
Why is that the only metric? Why not average learning level? Or the average interest in science? Or the number of grad school applicants?
I ask this because i have trouble seeing extra time spent in education as zero sum wastage.
The subjects are highschool level - it's half rote memorization and half trick math and physic questions that using calculus are going to make 1000% more easy but are not allowed because calculus are not a highschool subject.
It's a huge waste of resource and time.
if those studying made the intelligence of said person higher, then it's not a waste. It might be inefficient (because there may be faster ways to raise intelligence than these sorts of studying), but it's strictly better than not studying.
Otherwise, by the same argument, people going to the gym and "wasting" their time doing body building or training when they're not professional athletes are wasting their time.
Everyone can cram the test and that's not going to create more college admissions. Nor does it 'raise intelligence', it just flat out don't.
going to the gym for exercise vs bodybuilding is different. I'm specifically talking about people doing bodybuilding or training for specific purpose without being a professional athlete, rather than regular exercise.
You're just asserting that one thing has benefits, while denying another thing has any benefits. All i'm saying is that your cultural bias is clouding your judgement because studying for tests is the same as bodybuilding - the person chose to do it, therefore it has benefits for themselves. And how do you know studying for tests don't raise intelligence? you at least get more knowledge.
It's like to learn how to describe the same thing with many different methods.
Sure, it's not entirely a waste time that the tutoring can teach some interesting aspects. But at the end of the day, it does not teach anything that was not already covered in the school teaching.
And we all know that Chinese students in US tend to limit their thinking in narrow scope. Then why not let the students to absorb non curriculum staff outside of the class, therefore eliminating most of the tutoring.
The cram school is being evaluated by one metric and one metric only: how much boost can it offer to the kids' test score.
I'd like to know where this explanation is coming from. Is that something that the CCP actually stated somewhere, or is the the author assuming?
Link in Chinese: https://tinyurl.com/5nu8kebn
(We will monitor the frequencies and fees of extracurricular tutoring for students. In order to balance the educational cost on families and schools, we will strictly govern out-of-school tutoring.)
[0] http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2021-07/20/content_5626190.htm
Declining birth rate is definitely a major metric that the Chinese government is secretly watching closely. There are reports that Beijing is hiding all birth rates by region https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/mritl5/breaking_xinj.... Also, Nikkei reports that newborns are down 18% y/y https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/China-s-population-growth-sl.... And the recent government relaxation to 3 kids have been mocked by the netizens in China as pointless. IMO, China will not be able to reduce falling birth rate with any government policies, since most families have been indoctrinated with 1-child policy for decades.
Attack on private tech companies The attacks on Alibaba, Tencent, Didi and others are two fold: to reduce individuals power within the CCP controlled economy, and to remove their potential to list abroad so as to reduce capital outflow. The trend is for these Chinese tech companies to weaken in the upcoming decades.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article, but warrants a strong mention. Reduce free thinkings. The Chinese government have been introducing mao-era communist party thinkings into public schools. (or brainwash, whichever). The shutting down of private schools will enable the public schools to exert even more power on the kids. This is also in line with the Chinese government shutting down mosques and churches in recent times.
Also something else bears mentioning in the context of this: Chinese government is actively reducing the number of uyghur births. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57383548.
tl;dr Once the U.S. listing is successful, the investor's return is in U.S. dollars. If funds return to China, they will enjoy various preferential treatments for overseas capital. Of course, it is also possible not to return to China and to be divided among the bigwigs hidden in investment institutions. Therefore, overseas listing for cash is an important way of capital outflow.
Incidently, the recent bitcoin shutdown by the Chinese government is also partly due to capital outflow concerns
"The “lying flat” movement was jumpstarted in April when a post on Baidu titled “Lying Flat Is Justice” went viral on the platform. A manifesto of renunciation, the post shared the author’s lessons from two years of joblessness. The extraordinary stresses of contemporary life, the author concluded, were unnecessary, the product of the old-fashioned mindset of the previous generation. It was possible, even desirable, he argued, to find independence in resignation: “I can be like Diogenes, who sleeps in his own barrel taking in the sun.” Discussions about “lying flat” picked up pace in May, as young Chinese, over-worked and over-stressed, weighed the merits of relinquishing ambition, spurning effort, and refusing to bear hardship."
The TLDR is that younger Chinese are burned out the with idea of working themselves to death at a chance for success, and as has happened with many first world countries, the cost of what is deemed success (homes, children) is too damn high.
https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-lying-flat-took-chinas-ove...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-lyin...
https://qz.com/2019322/why-lying-flat-a-niche-chinese-millen...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/lying-flat-gains-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire...
Of cuz, one can say that tutoring crams the students so that they are dilussioned of the value of education and further the societal doctrine.
But it simply is not a good reasoning...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
[2] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/RAMJ-03-...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-17/china-s-h...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/cost-having-child-china-...
I just talked to my friends back in China, they don't say anything about students being part of the movement.
Burnout from stressful non-physical office works is a well established concept, though not yet widely agreed to also happen on kids.
Basically if you keep a person in an office to attend meetings and conferences for 12 hours a day for 5-10 years, some functions of the brain ends its life and the person won’t be able to take on certain tasks. That’s what it is IMO.
Like many developed countries have done, birth rates boosting is often hard to achieve.
Therefore, by cracking down on this industry, there is a chance to actually reduce the cost of raising a child, which is the main impediment to natality.
I think the other posters are right; it's an added expense for parents and a zero sum game. It's in nobody's interest to allow this to continue.
The government should be able to provide enough education to anyone who needs it. But to do that they need many teachers. Somebody must educate the teachers. More learning overall grows the intellectual capacity of the whole nation, it is not a zero-sum game.
I seriously think this is about Chinese Government not wanting its population to be educated in Western values.
The students at these "academies" are not being given a robust education in mathematics, science, philosophy or the languages - let alone Western values.
They are rote-learning an extremely narrow type of problem that appears on the gaokao (university entrance exam) - literally hundreds of the same type of exam questions over and over in order to gain an advantage over their peers (hence the "zero-sum" comment).
This comes at the expense of their mental health as well as other, more enriching (and idealogically dangerous!) activities such as socialising with their friends, helping their family with household duties or engaging in rich discussions online.
You could draw a long bow and argue that this stabilises the CCP's power by reducing the drive to protest of angry students who have not been accepted into the universities of their choice, but it has nothing to do with suppressing education or intellectual value.
Sounds like the problem is with the gatekeeping exam and limited amount of good quality universities(aka money problem).
How does banning a practice reduce students stress? They still have to compete in order to get into these limited seat universities with the same exam that you say are easily game-able.
I highly doubt people will just ignore a path that exists that can get them there, so we will have to wait and see what happens with the parents' economic stress.
I'd actually guess that a ban on for-profit tutoring is a larger risk for the CCP. Students spending their time unsupervised could lead to more "unwanted though" than students spending their time memorizing and reasoning around well-vetted facts about how governments work or about the history of Confucianism.
Which is a zero sum game.
The solution then would not be to forbid the cram-schools, but the universities which apply that kinds of bad acceptance criteria. No?
You people can really spin anything China related to a conspiracy. The Cold War propaganda machine has worked really well. Get a grip.
Lots of western nations that have a 20y head start on China for measures to boost the birth rate but not much success all around, so I wonder if it's gonna be any different.
Anecdotally, a lot of my friends either chose not to have kids even though they were financially able to do so, or 'only' had one kid later in life after they checked a bunch of life goals off their list. And of course there's a segment of friends who never found anyone to partner with.
Furthermore, it feels like the checklist in what people are looking for in a life partner is more complicated now than ever, which can increase the amount of time it takes for a person to find a partner to have a child with. I assume that's a good thing as it may reduce the likelihood of divorce by resulting in a more ideal match, but it potentially comes at a cost of spending TONS of time filtering via messaging, dates, etc. It took me a whopping five years before meeting someone online that actually felt like something with a real future.
If you really want to boost childbirths, give people some hope for tomorrow that we have any capacity to deal with the most immediate existential threats and that their children won't be hunting cockroaches in some Mad Max world.
Where I live the externalizations are going gangbusters, and I believe this to be true in most other places. Boomers are insanely rich with decent property portfolios (bought before the interest rate plunges, then used as leverage to borrow more and buy more after the plunge) and their children - even a lot of successful ones - can barely afford shoebox apartments with sticker prices fast approaching one million dollars. The stock market is long-term up despite their being no rational explanation - no significant increase in dividends - other than the large increase in money supply due to the cheap rate to borrow, not to mention all the other insane financial "instruments" invented after the official interest rate hit near zero (QE, emergency "loans" to the super rich that will likely never be repaid). Businesses are enjoying ridiculous valuations but yet complain about their staffing costs. The total absence of any real increase in the median salary. (I know here on HN we worship the overachiever with six-figure salaries at FAANGs that start with a number > 1 but it is sociopathic not to consider the life experience of average or "normal" people in our society. They are our neighbours after all.) Insane immigration levels in the presence of declining prosperity for citizens is another side-effect of an inflation-driven economy.
This explains why the birth rates are low in Western and prosperous Far East nations (China, Japan, Korea). And how the birth rates for newly arrived immigrants declines from that of their home country. The side-effect phenomena are strikingly similar.
I agree that the connection between tutoring and birth rates is difficult to see.
Check out the story of Ceaușescu and the Romanian orphans[1].
The Catholic countries in Western Europe (Ireland, Spain, Portugal, etc) notoriously had much lower fertility rates than secular, Orthodox, and Protestant countries for decades before the Catholic ban on contraception was lifted.
TLDR: banning contraceptives causes great suffering and doesn't materially shift fertility trends.
At first I thought this was the typical “let’s be equal by slowing down over-achievers,” as we see this more and more in the west as well.
It’s crazy to me that this ‘after school study’ was identified as a major reason for declining birth rates, as if decades of policy and the ensuing culture could turn on a dime and the government could ramp womb production by 250% from the party offices.