The Company Making Billions Off China’s Worried Parents

The weekend ritual for many American kids includes hanging out with friends, sports, cruising the mall, or honing their online gaming skills in Fortnite. Steven, a serious-looking 9-year-old public school student in Beijing, spent a recent Friday evening in a classroom at a tutoring center operated by TAL Education Group, cramming mathematics drills. On Saturday he was back for extra instruction in English and Chinese. “He likes the environment at TAL, where classes are lively and students get to play little games while learning,” says his mother, Zhao Liu, a nurse in a Beijing military hospital. “His father and I would never force him to study.”

No one has to, because even elementary school students in testing-obsessed China know the importance of doing well on the dreaded national exams. Those who do poorly can end up in dead-end livelihoods with no chance of college admission. That’s why many parents are gladly willing to make the investment in time and money—Steven’s folks spend about 20,000 yuan ($3,124) a year for his tutoring—to guarantee a bright future for their offspring. That desire has also turned TAL, the nation’s largest tutoring outfit, into a major money spinner. But that position has been put at risk by the Chinese government’s crusade to cut back on academic stress and foster childhood creativity. A primary target: the kind of extracurricular drilling TAL provides.