Too expensive children: why did the Chinese authorities destroy the institution of tutoring

The history of the fight against fertility, and for the birth rate in China is well known, but sometimes it takes such forms that you just grab your head. Popular blogger Aleksey Koloskov drew attention to another campaign that virtually destroyed an entire service industry in this country - tutoring.

Today, in contrast to the end of the last century, when the country was threatened with overpopulation, thanks to the "carrot and stick" policy, most often only one child is born in Chinese families. And as usual, parents foster, cherish and cherish him in every possible way, doing everything so that he grows up smart and successful. In particular, they hire tutors for him. Since this service is very expensive, parents try to earn more money to pay for it. Experts say that China's tutoring market is around $ 100 billion annually.

However, according to the reasoning of officials, in doing so, parents will never want to have a second, let alone a third, child, and thus will not raise the birth rate in China, which has become very low in recent years. Therefore, the authorities decided to make tutoring both unnecessary and unprofitable - public schools, in their opinion, will cope on their own and no worse.

But this is where the problem arises: what should a huge army of tutors do, how should they feed their children? And will they give birth to them?

However, Koloskov also sees one advantage that the Chinese authorities receive from such a policy: “A large number of unemployed tutors will be forced to look for work, which means they can go to work in production, where right now there is a sorely lack of workers. It is easier to manage uneducated people..."