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China’s Anti-Privatisation and Anti-Global Education Policy Changes

China recently banned for-profit tutoring after school for 5-15 year olds. This means that private companies who charge parents for tutoring their children can no longer operate.

This news is very relevant to both the sociology of education and the topic of globalisation.

The ‘banning’ of foreign companies is part of a broader Chinese-strategy to reduce homework for 5-15 year olds in order to make school less stressful and give children a more balanced childhood.

New guidance from the central Chinese Communist Party says that no homework should be give to children in grades 1 and 2, with only 90 minutes a day being given to those in the later years of their schooling.

The guidance also states that schools and parents should take steps to ensure that children are not spending too long on their electronic devices, they are getting some physical exercise and they should promote their mental well-being.

Private tutoring can still take place but it has to be run by non-profit companies with a physical base in China.

The changes mean that many foreign education companies who ran online zoom-based tutorial lessons have had to shut down.

NB some parents are already getting around these measures by employing live-in tutors!

Sociological Analysis and Relevance to A-level Sociology

At first glance this looks like China finally developing a more child-centred approach to education, like has been the case in Britain for decades, and especially the last 20 years, where safeguarding policies are extremely well established.

This looks like what me might call ‘social progress’ as China moves away from its ‘extreme’ education system – with its very long hours for children in school and with most (75% in 2016) children doing further study after school and at weekends.

Another possible reason behind these changes is China’s Ageing population – after years of policies which restricted the numbers of children families could have (such as the one-child policy) China now has a rapidly ageing population, but people are no longer choosing to have lots of children because they are expensive, partly because of parents having to spend so much money on tutoring due to the highly competitive education system.

By strictly limiting the amount of private tutoring and banning for-profit tutoring altogether, this should reduce the cost of having children and possibly encourage parents to have more children!

This is also an example of reversing the privatisation of education – the Chinese State has made it a lot more difficult for private foreign companies to operate in China – they now have to register through a non-profit Chinese company with a physical base in China. It’s not an outright ban, but has already meant many foreign companies just given up on China.

This also seems to be an example of a reversal of the globalisation of education…with China to restrict access to foreign education companies, preventing money flowing from wealthy Chinese parents out to foreign companies, and is an example of protectionism by stealth.

In the same vein, this is also an example of a move away from neoliberalism.

Find out More/ Sources

China Briefing (2021): Regulatory Clarity After China Bans For Profit Tutoring in Core Education.

Reuters (2021) China Bans Private Tutors from Given Online Classes

Why is China Cracking down on Private Schools?

See this post on a ‘Chinese School Experiment‘ done in the UK for an insight into how ‘extreme’ Chinese education can be.

Huge increase in Chinese students studying at UK universities – a funny kind of ‘globalisation’

The U.K. now issues more than 100 000 student visas per year to Chinese students studying at British universities, with the numbers of Chinese students studying in the UK increasing at about 5% a year since at least 2013-14

Chinese students are by far the largest non-European student group living temporarily in the UK for 3 years or so while they pursue their degree courses. The next largest university feeder country outside of Europe is India, but only 20 000 student visas are issued to Indian students per year.

Moreover, if you look at the stats below, taken from the Higher Education Student Statistics Authority (nice ring to it that!) you can see that Chinese students are the only group from outside Europe who are coming into the UK in increasing numbers. Every other country is sending very similar numbers now compared to 2013-14.

Now to my mind this seems to be more a trend towards increasing bilateralism between China and UK universities, and if anything evidence of stagnant or even a decline in the ‘globalisation of British Higher Education’.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This is most obviously relevant to the sociology of education module, especially useful as some quite nuanced evidence against the globalisation of education (IF like me you don’t think just two countries enhancing links between them is globalisation)

China – The World’s Biggest Tech Thief?

Chinese theft of intellectual property from other countries (mainly the US and those in the EU) represents the greatest transfer of wealth in history according to Keith B Alexander, former director of the US National Security Agency.

intellectual property includes such things as patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets and software, and China has a long history of stealing such things ever since it opened up its economy to foreign trade in the late 1970s. China has long been known as the country of origin for counterfeit DVDs (among other products), but more recently one its largest tech firms, the phone manufacturer Huwai was accussed of encouraging employees with bonuses for gathering confidential information from competitors.

To give you an idea of the scale of this, The United States estimated in 2017 that Chinese theft of American intellectual property costs between $225bn and $600bn annually,

The type of information stolen covers a huge range of sectors: everything from the designs for wind turbines to cars, medical devices and computer chips. In one infamous case, Germany’s Siemens introduced the high-speed train to China only to find that subsequent extensions of the system were manufactured by its Chinese partner, China National Railway Corporation, which had developed similar technology suspiciously quickly.

How has China managed this?

Back in day China was more likely to engage in full on cyber-espionage, but more recently it has developed a set of policies which forces foreign multinationals working in China to divulge secrets while they are forbidden similar access to Chinese companies’ information.

Technically this is against WTO rules, but it seems that China, being a ‘big player’ on the international scene can get away with this.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is a great example of a ‘state crime’ – state sponsored theft of intellectual property, and it’s a great example of a crime that up until this point has gone unpunished!

It also reminds us that where globalisation is concerned, there is no such thing as genuine free-trade, it’s only as free as the large nation states allow it to be.

NB – as a final note, Chinese intellectual property theft might be a thing of a past, China has invested so much in skilling its population up in technology that it is likely to become a cutting edge tech innovator in its own right in the not too distant future!

China’s Social Credit System: Big Data meets Big Brother

Most of us are used to having our daily activities constantly monitored and evaluated – what we buy, how much tax we pay (or not), what television programmes we watch, what websites we visit, where we go, how ‘active’ we are’, who our friends are and how we interact with them – such monitoring is now done routinely via Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Now, imagine if all of that ‘big data’ was fed to the central government, and mashed into a single number which would be our ‘citizen score’ which in turn would measure the value of our contribution to our nation and which would inform everyone of how patriotic, politically sound and trustworthy we are as a person.

And imagine further if that ‘citizen score’ determined our eligibility for certain jobs, our creditworthiness, where our children could go to school, or even our chances of getting a date.

This isn’t fantasy, China is in the process of developing such a Social Credit System, which will be mandatory by 2020. Presently, the Chinese government is liaising with various big data companies and trialing out schemes in order to figure out what kinds of data to collect, and what algorithms to use to determine an individual’s final ‘citizen score’.

The Trial Run…

One company which is set to be a major player in running China’s social credit system is Alibaba, which is currently trialling a ‘credit ranking scheme’ which people can voluntarily sign up to.

The scheme gives people a score of between 350 and 950, based on data collected from five major categories…

Credit history – does the person pay their bills on time?

Ability to fulfill contractual obligations on time
Personal information – mobile phone number, address
Behaviour and preference – such as what products someone buys – people who buy nappies are given a higher score, because parents tend to be more responsible, people who spend 10 hours a day playing video games are given a lower score.

Interpersonal relationships – who your friends are and what you say on social media — those who ‘big up the Chinese economy’ get a higher score, for example.

It’s the the fourth and fifth categories above which are the most interesting… the first three are pretty standard (insurance companies in most countries will use these to assess premiums), but the last two involve turning personal comments into social and political capital…. they really politicize the personal!

When China’s social credit system ‘goes live’ in 2020, private companies will essentially be spying for the Chinese government – and negative tweets about Tiananmen Square for example, will hurt your social credit score.

And if your friends post negative tweets about Tiananmen Square, well, that will also make your score go down!

Rewards and Punishments

Volunteers who are currently signed up to Alibaba’s trial get rewards if they get a high credit score – preferential access to loans if they get a score above 600, and if they get to 650 they get faster check-ins at hotels and airports.

When the system eventually goes live in 2020, people with lower citizen scores will be punished – with slower internet speeds, restricted access to restaurants and will lose the right to freely travel abroad, for example.

As the government states the social credit system will ‘allow they trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’.

Is it that different to what we’ve got in the West?

While this may look like a horrific meeting between George Orwell’s 1984 and Pavlov’s dogs, maybe this isn’t that different to western big data management systems?

We’ve had credit scoring for 70 years now, that doesn’t exist in China yet, so this could just be a rapid development of what here has evolved by stealth.

And as to using personalized data….. individuals already rate restaurants, movies and books, and each other!, and various companies routinely scrutinize big data….maybe we are also getting closer to the Chinese concept of ‘life scoring’ as our real world and online worlds merge.

Sources

Modified from The Week, November 2017

Book – Rachel Botsman (2017) Who Can You Trust: How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why it Could Drive Us Apart

Is China’s Involvement in Africa a new form of Colonialism (i.e. neocolonialism)?

China’s development over the last three decades has depended heavily on its investment in Africa: it relies on a number of natural resources extracted from Africa, and is also one of the major leasers of land in Africa (which it uses to export crops back to China). In order to facilitate the extraction of natural resources, return, thousands of Chinese workers now live and work in Africa, and the Chinese have developed infrastructure (roads for example) in many African countries.

The Chinese claim that most partnerships between Chinese businesses in Africa are mutually beneficial, a win-win arrangement between the Chinese and the ‘host nation’ – China gets resources, Africans get jobs and development.

Critics, however say that what the Chinese are doing in Africa is just a continuation of colonialism, and another form of neo-colonialism: it is basically a wealthier nation extracting resources as cheaply as possible from desperately poor countries and giving them as little as possible in return.

The three articles below are well worth a read to get an idea about the range of opinion on this matter:

This Global Policy article: ‘The New Colonialism in Africa’ makes the case (as you can tell by the title) that China are basically neo-colonists
This Guardian Article is more neutral.

This Harvard Political Review article seems to take a more sympathetic view towards China, focusing more on the benefits of development for African nations.

Students might like to read through them, compile a list of arguments and evidence for and against the view that China’s involvement in Africa benefits Africa, rather than just China.

Assess the View that Poor Countries Will Always Remain Poor (20)

An essay plan including Modernisation and Dependency Theory, Neoliberalism and World System’s Theory, Bottom Billion and Neo-Modernisation theory, as well as contemporary trends such as war and conflict and environmental decline and case studies such as India, China, Afghanistan and Haiti.

Introduction

The view in the question is most closely associated with Dependency Theory which argued that poor countries would remain poor due to their exploitation through colonialism and then neo-colonialism.

However, the historical record of the last 200 years of industrial development clearly shows that the above view is overstated: most poor countries, including many ex-colonies, have got wealthier, and have done so through a number of different strategies. However, it is also true that despite enormous increases in wealth globally, many countries remain trapped in poverty.

In order to address the question above I will do the following:

Firstly I will review the various theories of development which have pointed to a number of different causes of and related solutions to poverty in order to demonstrate the overwhelming historical evidence against the view in the question.

Secondly, I will discuss how emergent global problems such as the spread of war, conflict and terrorism, increasing consumption and environmental decline could mean that those countries which today are still poor today might well remain poor in the future.

Numerous theories of development have pointed to a number of causal factors related to poverty – according to these theories if certain things happen then poor countries are likely to remain poor…

Modernisation Theory – Poor countries remain poor because of their traditional values

Dependency Theory – Poor countries remain poor because of the legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism
World Systems Theory – Poor countries remain poor because of trade rules established by the WTO which works on behalf of rich countries and TNCs.
Neoliberalism – Poor countries remain poor because of too much Official

Development Aid and Corrupt governments
People Centered Development – The question of whether poor countries are economically poor is irrelevant – there are many different paths to development and many different ways of measuring development
Paul Collier’s Bottom Billion Theory – Poor countries remain poor because of Four traps – Poor governance, ethnic conflict, the resource curse and being landlocked with poor neighbours

Hans Rosling and Jeffry Sachs – Poor countries remain poor because of the poverty trap and lack of Official Development aid from the west

Conversely, if certain things happen, then poor countries will not necessarily remain poor. Countries will develop if….

(MT) Poor countries need to learn from the West, industrialise and progress through the five stages of growth

(DT) Poor countries need to break free from Western Capitalism and isolate themselves through socialist models of development
(WST) They position themselves as semi-periphery countries, manufacturing goods rather than exporting raw materials – e.g. The Philippines/India/ China
(NL) Poor countries need to open up their markets through deregulation, privatisation and low taxation – e.g. Chile

(PCD) There are diverse paths to development but all of them should respect the principles of equality, democracy and sustainability.
(BB) We need a Marshal Aid plan for the Bottom Billion, countries need to sort out poor governance and we need fairer trade rules
(Hans and Jeff) We still need massive aid injections, which need to be targeted initially on improving health, but also on women’s rights and education.

Case studies and global trends information which suggests poor countries will remain poor

War and Conflict/ Terrorism
Higher rates of consumption as countries develop

Environmental challenges and the lack of global agreements on climate change
Increase Military Expenditure
The increasing power of TNCs and lack of fair trade rules
The lack of commitment to giving official development aid by rich nations

Haiti
Iraq/ Syria
Afghanistan

Liberia

Case studies and global trends information which suggests poor countries will continue to develop

The lowering of birth rates

The increasing number of children in school
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
The UN’s sustainable development goals

Continued Economic growth globally
China
India

Brazil
Nigeria

Conclusion and Analytical Points – Using the evidence above BUILD a conclusion

From the above evidence it is clear that not all countries have remained poor….

The most applicable theory which helps us explain underdevelopment today is ____________________ and following this theory poor countries are most likely to develop if….

However, some of the challenges in the world today suggest that some underdeveloped countries might remain poor in the future. For example…

On balance I feel that that while all countries will probably not remain poor (delete as appropriate) (1) the majority of poor countries will remain poor and only a few will develop / (2) most developing countries will develop but a few are likely to remain poor/ (3) add in an alternative closing sentence of your choice…

Global Development Revision Notes

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my Global Development Revision Notes –

53 Pages of revision notes covering the following topics within global development:

Globalisation
Defining and measuring development
Theories of development (Modernisation Theory etc)

Aid, trade and development
The role of organisations in development (TNCs etc)
Industrialisation, urbanisation and development

Employment, education and health as aspects of development
Gender and development
War, conflict and development

Population growth and consumption
The environment and sustainable development

Are Chinese Teaching Methods Best? (Experiments in Education)

According to recent studies, China is home to one of the best education systems in the world, while Britain is trailing a long way behind. In some studies Chinese students are three years ahead of British students in reading and writing ability.

China is well known for its ‘tough education’ methods, but can these methods be used to improve the performance of British students? In a recent BBC documentary: ‘Are our kids tough enough? Chinese school’ a field experiment was conducted to find out.

Five Chinese teachers took over the education of a class of fifty Year 9 pupils at Bohunt School in Liphook and taught them (in one class of 50!) using Chinese teaching methods for a month, and then tested in English, Maths, Science and Mandarin, and the results compared to other students who remained receiving a more typical British Education.

The main features of the Chinese School consisted of:

The school day being 12 hours long with a 7 a.m. start consisting of a flag raising ceremony and outdoor exercises.
In the classroom, most lessons were essentially lectures. Teachers stood at the front writing the theory on the board, while the students (were supposed to) take notes and learn.
PE was a compulsory – and students were timed, tested and ranked against each other.

Results

The ultimate test of the experiment was to see if Chinese teaching methods improved educational performance – which they did (or at least appeared to have – see below). Students who attended the Chinese School for four weeks scored about 10% points (on average) higher in Mandarin, Maths and Science and they also did better in English, but with a smaller margin.

The experiment also revealed that there was something of a culture clash – those students were not particularly self-disciplined or well-behaved did not respond well to a Chinese style of teaching which is less student-centered and not as inclined to encourage individualism.

Limitations of the field experiment

I say that the Chinese-School kids achieved better test scores – what we’re not told is how much they improved, or what their ability was compared to the control group. I’m assuming all this was controlled for.

The Hawthorne Effect might apply – the improved results might be a result of the students knowing their involved in an experiment (and knowing they’re on TV) or the better results might simply exposing the kids to something different, rather than it being about those exact Chinese methods (a change is as good as a rest!)

It’s also not clear how representative this school is – Bohunt seems to be a brilliant school, enlightened (which is reflected in getting involved in this whole experiment in the first place). Would you get the same findings somewhere else?

Ethics: Some (wrong) individuals might try and argue that some of the children experienced harm to their self-esteem by being ranked in PE (other (right) individuals might argue this is just life, tough, get over it kiddo).

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China’s Anti-Privatisation and Anti-Global Education Policy Changes