Photo by Mwesigwa Joel
No clickbait here and that's a low estimate. China has finished its crackdown of what was one of the best online jobs that you could have, being an online ESL teacher. How do I know? Because my wife has been crying and upset about it for the past day and a half.
You can see the list of companies that they shut down from this site.
https://oetjobs.com/list-chinese-online-esl-jobs/?fwp_per_page=100
I counted over 150 different ones. The largest company, VIPKid had over 70,000 teachers teaching and was worth over $1 billion dollars. Itutor was 2nd place with 30,000 teachers. The rest of the companies didn't come close and only had 3,000 to 5,000 teachers. The number of students served was in the millions.
The entire industry was worth $140 billion dollars. The tycoon in the industry, Larry Chen, lost $22 billion and 98% of his company's value since January. He is now only worth $230 million USD.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-20/china-crackdown-private-tutoring/100392352
https://twitter.com/ChauDave/status/1427951977980305411/photo/1
- ChauDave
Absolute insanity.
Why the crackdown? The closet explanation I could find in English is from
Quartz
"In late July, China issued a harsh set of rules (link in Chinese) that aim to ease homework and after-school study hours for students, a policy dubbed the “double reduction.” They bar for-profit companies from teaching China’s school curriculum, block foreign investors from holding stakes in firms offering such classes, and don’t allow after-school tutoring on weekends or during vacation. The idea is to both make educating children less costly for parents, and to reduce the pressure on children from an early age" https://qz.com/2045981/chinas-clampdown-on-tutoring-upends-the-lives-of-millions/
So basically China was leeching too much money to foreign countries and it was healthier for their kids. They even banned language apps from the app store, like Duolingo and Memrise.
Is it true though? Probably not about the latter. Some of the teachers are moving to China to teach in person. However, and this isn't in the news, they were offering teachers to record "demo classes" with no students a couple months ago.
One company, fired all the teachers after accumulating these videos. The theory is they were making ghost classrooms that had the prerecorded classes, paused and resumed when needed, playing over zoom with just a low level tech person running them. Presto, no more foreign payroll.
The company my wife worked for was also offered this in the past couple weeks leading up to the shutdown. They were mysterious, high paying classes with no students and infinite slots being offered, under the guise of being a training video.
She had been teaching for nearly three years part-time for specifically iTutor and then Whales as an English teacher for Chinese students, via Zoom. We knew about Zoom before the pandemic, so it was funny to hear everyone talk it about it suddenly, but that's a different story.
She was paid a lot. She made $22+ an hour, with bonuses for attendance. Each class was an hour long and the school provided all the material in slideshows, no knowledge of Mandarin required. She only needed to grade for a couple minutes each class and basically show up via zoom at the appointed time. This was an extra $1000 a month in income for 10 or so classes a week she did around her normal job.
We never put all our eggs in one basket in regards to employment with China, we aren't that crazy, but it still hurts. She loved her students and the parents and they loved her back. The past day and a half she's been receiving messages trying to convince her to privately tutor them still, but we're currently in a foreign country and don't want to risk our Visa by accepting Chinese currency into our bank account.
So there you have it. We knew China would screw us over one day and it took 3 years, but they finally did it.