Post8 (340): The Education Industry in China
Recently, the Chinese government has promulgated a new education law, reducing any form of high-intensity extracurricular classes, so that young students can have real vacation time. As a result, the shares of Chinese education companies have fallen by 40% to 70%, putting many companies in danger of bankruptcy, and overseas investors have also collectively withdrawn from these heavily regulated industries in China that they don’t “understand”.
China Moves Against Education Companies, Causing Shares to Plunge — The New York Times (nytimes.com)
In response to this incident, I would like to discover some of my own opinions, mainly around the regulatory thinking and political logic of the Chinese government, and also explain some of the new characteristics of the Chinese model in the new era.
China issues guidelines to ease burden on young students (www.gov.cn)
To begin with, it can be seen that the national government is now starting from the commanding heights of power to rectify the entire education industry from top to bottom, which has long gone beyond the scope of the Divison of Education. In other words, the central government coordinates all departments to solve education problems, and the department of education is only a core executive unit of this policy rather than a leader. Therefore, the issue of education is not a policy issue in subdivisions, but an overall political issue, which must be understood from a macro-political perspective. From this viewpoint, we can try to ask several questions about Chinese education:
1. Is education a very core social resource that is of great significance for maintaining social stability and promoting common prosperity? In particular, how to create greater equality of opportunity for society? That is, should the income ability of the family affect the children’s ability to obtain educational resources? — — China indeed has a national college entrance examination, but it is still affected by many factors, from taking extracurricular classes to buying school-district housing, all related to the family’s financial ability. The expansion of equality and opportunity is very important to prevent the solidification of classes, improve social mobility, and maintain social vitality.
2. What is the content of education? Does it involve core values and ideology? Should it be included in supervision to match the Chinese model? Perhaps this is not a core issue when information was relatively blocked, but in today’s diverse world education content is closely related to the vitality of the country. For example, the so-called elite groups, entrepreneurs, executives, and overseas elites, what kind of education are their children receiving? Is it imported offshore education or Chinese education? If it is a systematic “imported education” (ie “international education”), how to ensure their recognition and understanding of China?
3. If education is such an important field, what kind of resource allocation method should it have, and what kind of industry policy should it implement? First of all, what role should public education play in it? Should it undertake more and become a provider of quality, balanced, and free public education? Can the Internet and emerging technologies be used to level educational resources? For example, let the government purchase and coordinate arrangements, and top teachers will provide online courses across the country — -even let them focus on network-based teaching and empowerment of other educational institutions and personnel, rather than specifically targeting their in-person students. Technology and the unique political system make it possible to arrange for China in 2021. The prosperity is huge.
4. The relationship between education and finance. What role should social capital play in the education industry? What role should finance play? Finance and capital must be profit-seeking, and the intervention will definitely make education industrialized. Capital support will also make the industry more fierce and vicious competition (now called “内卷-involution”) and. Therefore, the central government hopes to cut off the connection between finance and education and prevent the disorderly expansion of educational industrialization. Furthermore, we see that most education companies are listed overseas (especially listed in the United States). As long as the capital chain of the industrialization of education is offshore and outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, then China cannot cut off the connection between education and finance, and cannot achieve its goal of reshaping education. Therefore, it is necessary to restrict foreign investment in the education industry.
5. What will be China’s ultimate talent selection plan? Still, it is the college entrance examination. This mechanism is an inevitable choice under the political equality of education in China, and it is absolutely irreplaceable. As long as there is a relatively open, transparent, and standardized mechanism, people can prepare and respond in advance. As long as enough people do this and find resources relatively easily, involution will occur. Therefore, the state should strengthen management and control and rectify the education industry before the high school stage, so that entrepreneurs do not have the opportunity to make money by consuming people’s anxiety.
Therefore, education is a real big politics. Behind the policies put forward by the central government, there is a whole set of grand ideas, concepts, and logic. In my opinion, the core of this system is “moral”. China is actually a “德” society, that is, behind everything is a higher and more abstract ethics — -the so-called “high morals”. Political parties, governments, and even laws, regulations, and policies are all subject to this high moral. It comes from our civilization, cultural traditions, and social consensus. Of course, it is not static, it is gradual, and has the characteristics of the times. Leaders and governments must discover this consensus, and use it to determine the way and path of governance in our country. This system is beyond the legal system or does not operate within the legal system.
The Chinese political ethics, the pursuit of high morality, and the “instrumentalization” of law are unique to China. Under such morals, the government has been planning our society and formulating governance strategies from the perspective of decades and hundreds of years. There are clear values, concepts, and logic behind it. For the foreign investors mentioned in the previous part, they see only “arbitrary” and uncertainty, and naturally, they will only choose to withdraw their capital from education shares.
