So it has happened. It has gone through. It’s been announced with fanfare and great foreboding. And it pretty much turns the industry upside down whilst pulling it’s pants down and displaying the photographic evidence on the town hall notice board. After a year and a half, more actually, where the whole world has been kicked and scratched from the excessive Covid19 reaction, the Chinese government thinks nothing of announcing a new set of restrictions that make it increasingly impossible for a billion dollar industry to continue in it’s current guise.

A lot has been written over the last few days on many different EFL websites trying to tie down the specifics of these new restrictions. What we do know is they affect all the major China based companies providing weekend and holiday classes and a native UK teacher to front the class. As always with the CCP, there were many leaks over the months leading up to the official announcement. Small droppings of possible changes that made the industry sit up and shake, and also made a large, worldwide group of online teachers start twitching like a rabbit’s nose.

Over the last week it has been hard to take in. Hard to understand how a country can deliberately sabotage one of it’s most successful industries. Still that is what we have come to expect from the CCP and they never fail in there execution of this level of destruction. They’re doing this for the kids, however. Won’t someone please think of the kids. It’s to take the pressure off the over worked kids. Or it’s to encourage more parents to have more children. I am sure it is. Though, the parents who pay for extra hobby classes for the kids are often parents with enough disposable income that they have already had + 2 children, and still have enough left over for English and piano lessons. So I am not sure how this makes a different to the majority of kids who will miss out on there extra hour of English a week now.

What it will do is make the industry regroup and relocate. It will lead to a flood of available online teachers drifting into the private tutor sites that seem like they are already bursting at the seems with teachers anyway. What is going to happen? Who knows. I may wake up tomorrow and find it’s all been a fevered cheese dream. Or not.