The double reduction policy and education development in China

Abstract

Purpose

This policy review paper is an analysis of the Double Reduction Policy (DRP) of China that was promulgated in July 2021. It looks into its rationale as well as different stakeholders' early reactions to the policy.

Design/methodology/approach

Critical policy analysis (CPA) method was used to identify (1) the artefacts, such as language, objects and acts, that were significant carriers of the DRP; (2) communities of meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP and its implementation; (3) the local discourses relevant to the DRP; and (4) the tension points and their conceptual sources (affective, cognitive and/or moral) by different DRP stakeholders. As per the comparative education field, this paper compares the pre-DRP and post-DRP periods to tease out how the policy affects different stakeholders of education.

Findings

The DRP in China could be attributed to diverse factors such as demography, socialist economic and developmental visions and manpower structure. The implementation of the DRP has generated uneven reactions among different stakeholders and geographical regions both in speed and scale. While education stakeholders have no choice but to adopt the policy, they face challenges derived from a sudden halt of private educational resources and subsequent increased duties of parents and schools.

Originality/value

The significance of this early policy analysis lies in offering an insight into education development in China by analysing and deliberating the DRP from different perspectives.

Citation

Zhong, K. and Park, J. (2023), "The double reduction policy and education development in China", International Journal of Comparative Education and Development, Vol. 25 No. 3/4, pp. 137-152. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCED-09-2022-0063

1. Introduction

As the world's most populous nation, China is home to an enormous student population. The provision of quality education for this youth demographic has given rise to synergies and tensions, pull and push, between the strongly centralised state and other education stakeholders, all set against the backdrop of a traditional Confucian heritage culture (Park, 2011). This policy review paper delves into the implications of the “Double Reduction' education policy (双减政策 shuāngjiǎn zhèngcè), hereafter referred to as the DRP, which was introduced by Chinese central authorities in July 2021. With its aim to alleviate the burden of homework and out-of-school training/learning for students in formal education, the DRP has made a significant nation-wide impact through the outright ban of the after-school private tutoring industry, which had previously employed over 10 million people. The present study employed a post-positivist approach to education policy analysis, specifically the critical policy analysis (CPA) methodology (Young and Diem, 2017). CPA is a diverse range of analytical strategies that share a common critique of the traditional positivist approach to policy analysis that has historically dominated the field (p. 2). CPA methodology typically looks into one or more of the following concerns (Young and Diem, 2017): Difference between policy rhetoric and actual practice; policy's origin and evolution; dynamics of power, resources and knowledge surrounding a policy; policy's impact on social stratification and uneven relations; and resistance to or engagement in a policy by different stakeholders.

Accordingly, the 2021 DRP will be analysed by identifying (1) the artefacts, such as language, timing and contexts of the DRP; (2) meaning, interpretation, speech and practice that are relevant to the DRP implementation; (3) the stakeholders' discourses on DRP and (4) the synergy-tension points and their bases that reflect differences in perception by different stakeholders.

The choice of the CPA method benefited the design, purpose and the researchers' positioning of this study in a number of ways. The CPA method (1) emphasises the importance of non-empiricist framing and hermeneutics of the DRP formulation and its implementation; (2) it allows open analytical deliberation and contestation on the structures, processes and practices of the DRP; and (3) it organises the research claims and interpretations in an accountable fashion, less prone to the law-like, prescriptive argumentations (Yanow, 2000).

As per positioning in the field of comparative education, the unit of comparison of this article is time (Sweeting, 2014), namely, the pre-DRP and the post-DRP periods. Historiography or critical analysis of recent history is a methodology of its own standing in comparative education wherein all historiographical works such as interpretation and re-interpretation of events and contexts are essentially comparative (Sweeting, 2014). In turn, historiography draws on a critical analysis suggested by Michael Foucault (1972, 1983) in his hermeneutics cum deconstruction of power relations, namely, “archaeology”:

Archaeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them (…) but [does seek] a differential analysis of the modalities of discourse. (Foucault, 1972, p. 139)

Archaeology aims to identify “not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules” (Foucault, 1972, p. 138).

This paper is organised into five sections. After introducing the study, the second section offers an overview of the background of the DRP such as the timeline, socioeconomic context and the policy content itself. The third section considers the multifaceted rationale and related goals of the DRP. It will be followed by an analysis of education stakeholders' reaction to the DRP reported so far and the final section with conclusive remarks.

2. Context and content of the double reduction policy

To fully comprehend the education policies of China, it is essential to consider the rapidly evolving socio-economic and political landscape. China's international influence has reached unprecedented heights since the inception of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over a century ago, and this has brought about significant changes both internally and externally. China's assertive stance on the global stage is intertwined with the transformation of its society and institutions from within.

2.1 Contexts of DRP

The “Common Prosperity' political doctrine is the cornerstone of the Double Reduction education policy, as it reflects the Chinese State's pursuit of equitable distribution of wealth while curbing corruption in the face of the market economy's increasing impact on the general populace. In turn, “Common Prosperity' political doctrine is related to the CCP's demographic policies as we shall discuss later. The Common Prosperity doctrine is not a creation of the current government. Indeed, Deng Xiaoping articulated the “Getting rich first” (先富 Xiānfù) philosophy for Chinese economic development in the late 1970s, which “encouraged some people and some regions to get rich first” (Fan, 2006, p. 709). In 1993, Deng Xiaoping came up with the vision of “Moderately prosperous” (小康 Xiǎokāng) Chinese society at the end of the 20th century (Fan, 2006). The “Common prosperity” (共同富裕 Gòngtóng fùyù) political doctrine was coined in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006–2010), although its related ideas can be traced back to the political speeches delivered by former President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao around 2003 and 2004 respectively (Fan, 2006).

On 1 July 2021, President Xi Jinping announced that the Communist Party and people had already reached the second phase of a “Moderately prosperous” Chinese society (Nikkei, 2021a):

through the continued efforts of the whole Party and the entire nation, we have realized the first centenary goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. This means that we have brought about a historic resolution to the problem of absolute poverty in China

Only six weeks later, President Xi announced his Common Prosperity policy (Xi, 2021). This “fairer distribution of wealth” would be done in three ways accordingly (Nikkei, 2021b): (1) higher income/salary; (2) fair taxation and redistribution of cash among people; (3) and, direct donations or adjusting excessive incomes in the light of the emerging business paradigm of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG).

2.2 Content

The full name of the DRP is “Opinions on Further Reducing the Burden of Homework and Off-campus Training for Compulsory Education Students” and it was jointly issued on 24 July 2021 by the General Office of the Central Committee of the CCP and the General Office of the State Council (2021). It was categorised as an Opinion Paper. Among more than 15 different types of central policy documents such as Decision, Regulation, Order and Instruction (Lieberthal et al., 2020), an Opinion Paper is meant to provide insights and solutions to important problems while it also calls for further investigation and discussions prior to actual decision making. The effects of the DRP opinion paper, however, have been huge and immediate.

The DRP affects compulsory education students, that is, primary and middle school students. The main content of the DRP is as follows:

1. setting limits to the amount of written homework: No homework at all for grade 1–2 students; no more than 60 min for grade 3–6 students; and, a maximum of 90 min for middle school students (grade 7–9)

2. subject-based school instruction or training are prohibited on weekends, holidays and winter/summer breaks

3. tutoring (private) education institutions should be converted into non-profit organisations and, if the latter have any minimal fee, they should be subject to a government-guided tuition fee system

4. foreign capital is banned from investing in subject-based educational institutions

Even prior to the release of the DRP, the Chinese Ministry of Education had made efforts to reduce the burden of students' schoolwork. However, those efforts have been invariably met with an increase in the amount of students' tasks outside the school. Prior to the DRP, the number of off-campus training institutions was basically as large as schools (ChinaIRN, 2020; MOE, 2022a). The Chinese government explicitly noted that an excessive capital dominates the education sector. To the government, this situation endangers social harmony and stability since education should be a public good and should never be a marketplace of capitalism (Bloomberg News, 2021). To the eyes of the government, the DRP appears as an effective way to resolve dated problems in education and beyond.

Financial burden of parents is an indirect yet, arguably, the most significant target of the DRP. Parental involvement and parents-state partnership have significant impact on learning outcome (Hattie, 2012), all the more critical in a Confucian heritage society. Parents' heavy reliance on private tutorials also known as “shadow education” have been a mainstream feature of educational ecology in China (Zhang and Bray, 2018). The scope and size of Chinese shadow education sector and its financial burden for parents had been significant, young parents in particular. By 2020, the number of students enrolled in off-campus tutoring in China has reached 137m, with 8.5m teachers employed by approximately 200,000 private tutoring institutions (Zhao et al., 2021; Yu and Zhang, 2022). According to the 2004 Survey of Education and Employment of Urban Residents in China, the enrolment rates to shadow education in China were 73.8%, 65.6% and 53.5% respectively for primary school, junior secondary and senior secondary school students (Yu and Zhang, 2022). For a reason, therefore, a score of Chinese media hailed that the DRP aims at reducing household education expenditure and as a supporting measure of the Three-child Policy.

There were various follow-up policies and related actions in the aftermath. Ten days after the release of the DRP (3 August), the Economic Information Daily (经济参考报 Jīngjì cānkǎo bào) published an online article criticising a video game, Honour of Kings, by the tech corporation Tencent as “spiritual opium”. It immediately knocked down the value of Tencent and other video game companies such as NetEase in the Hong Kong stock market by at least 10% (Deng et al., 2021). The Honour of Kings game had 200m subscribers with about 100mn daily log-in to the website while the nation-wide video games is an industry with more than 270bn yuan (about USD 40bn) in the Chinese capital market. Although the term “spiritual opium”, which evokes a dated Marxist propaganda against religion, was deleted a few days later, the damage was already done. An explicit log-in ban for children below 12 was ensued. Children above 13 can play for one hour on weekdays and two hours on holidays. The details of this regulation keep changing. As of the time this paper is written, players under 18 can log-in only from 8 pm to 9 pm on Fridays, weekends and holidays. Given that the Economic Information Daily is a state-run newspaper, this indirect suppression on the game industry can be regarded as a part of larger scale crackdown in Tech-sector in the contexts DRP as well as Common Prosperity policy that will be discussed in the next section.

3. Rationale and justifications

The DRP is not the first attempt of China to reduce students' workload. The rationale and justifications of the DRP significantly differ from those of earlier attempts. In the following, we group rationale and justifications of the DRP into demographic challenges, the Common Prosperity doctrine, and those related to the current situation of Chinese manpower.

3.1 Demography

The “Three-child Policy” (三孩政策 Sānhái zhèngcè) was introduced in May 2021 due to a persistent low fertility rate. It overruled the 2015 “Two-child Policy” which, in turn, replaced the 1980 “One-child Policy”. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, only 10.62 million people were born in 2021 (People.cn, 2022). The ageing population and the trend of late marriage/childbearing are matters of great concern to the government. To top it all, the sounding alarm or “permitting” young couples to have more children might fail to reverse the current situation.

A salient phenomenon across all East Asian countries, the increasing cost of after-school private education, has become a significant portion of ordinary Chinese households' expenditure. To the eyes of the Chinese government, a key cause of the ongoing low birth rate is financial burden due to after-school private education. The DRP's rationale is that by reducing financial burden, young parents might have more children. Indeed, for many young Chinese parents, childrearing is a significant challenge. Since the enrolment to better public schools greatly depends on the geographic location of parents' residence cum household registration (户籍 hùjí), young parents spend their savings to take a mortgage of a house near to those highly regarded schools. Many young parents are also under pressure in their work places, where companies demand them for increased efficiency and long office hours. As a result, young employees' time outside their workplace has been reduced drastically in detriment of time for parenting. In short, a major justification of the DRP is to lessen the financial burden of young parents, which is no less critical than the burden of homework and after school tutorials of their children (Yuan, 2022).

3.2 Common prosperity doctrine

The DRP opinion paper contains a score of prohibitions on the grounds of sovereignty of the Chinese state: Prohibition of overseas education courses; prohibition of the recruitment of foreign personnel; and, prohibition of foreign capital investment in the education sector. The government sees that education should be an accessible service to the masses, and it should not be hijacked by “capitalist forces”.

The year of 2021 was the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, around which, patriotic education and “party education” have been emphasised. The use of Western textbooks and the spread of Western ideas in private institutions made the government feel increasingly uncomfortable, especially after the 2019 “69 Parade” in Hong Kong and the “Taidu” issues in Taiwan Island.

In early April 2021, the Alibaba company was charged with an 18.2bn yuan (USD 2.8 billion) fine for violating the anti-monopoly law, reifying the Chinese government’s actions against unbridled capital expansion. Under the Common Prosperity policy, there should be equal, healthy, and sustainable competition and every business, regardless of its size, should get the opportunity to thrive. For example, Chinese regulators have called for restraint and argued that bank employees are getting paid in excess and it may deepen the wealth gap (Chan, 2022). As a consequence, private schools are required to be transformed into public ones, thus, not allowed to charge high tuition fees (MOE, 2021). The government's rationale is that private schools' students/parents who can afford higher tuition fees and teachers with higher salaries are at odds with the ideals of Common Prosperity.

3.3 Manpower restructuring

Suppression on private tutoring unevenly affects education stakeholders in an already complex social hierarchy in China. Four decades after the economic reformation of Deng Xiao-ping, the upper cadre and wealthier can now afford private tutoring for their children. They also seek programmes and funding schemes such as “High-End Home Economics” (高端家政 Gāo duǎn jiāzhèng), “Crowd Financing Private Instruction” (众筹私教 Zhòng chóu sījiào), and “Study Tours and Research” (游学研学 Yóuxué yán xué) and can send their children to prestigious overseas schools (Chen et al., 2022). There have also been discussions about “Academic inheritors” (学二代 Xué èr dài), whose parents are at the forefront of academia as teachers or researchers, and are admitted to prestigious universities by publishing scholarly papers at an early age (Yuan, 2022). Ordinary parents, by contrast, usually do not have access to those opportunities. They are heavily reliant on local educational facilities (Yuan, 2022). An intensified competition for education resources and opportunities mostly occur at a lower level of the social ladder, say, the low- and middle-income families (Xue and Li, 2023).

The release of DRP coincided with other socioeconomic policies such as those on manpower. The government has been underlining the importance of the manufacturing sector and is persuading young people to return to factories. After all, its rationale goes on, as today's China still relies on rapid product iterations and modular production to break into the global market. The Chinese government is also aware that a skilled workforce who can contribute to the much-desired technological development is rather scarce and amidst an early signs of demographic crunch.

In March 2021, the Ministry of Education announced the “50/50 Streaming” policy (五五分流 Wǔwǔfēnliú) (MOE, 2021), which means that the upper 50% of students will go to high school after their junior secondary school exams, while the other half will go to vocational schools. The policy supersedes the prior ratio of 60–40, which was understood as a guarantee of the number of students in the future work force in China (Gan, 2021). An alternative analysis of the “50/50 Streaming” policy is a political act of formalising a fact on the ground because there have been reports that the proportion of students in secondary vocational education had already reached 48% in 2010 (Zhao, 2020). However, this so-called “equal weighting of general and vocational education” (普职同重 Pǔzhí tóngzhòng) is likely to be perceived by the public in different ways. Although the vocation education policy aims at building a modern vocational education system to train the so-called “Great Power Craftsmen”, the ordinary Chinese public is rather biased against vocational education. Vocational schools have long been considered as a place for youth “disposed” by the society (Duan Media, 2021). Students, who have graduated from vocational schools, do not get social recognition and income comparable to university graduates. Vocational school graduates, themselves, are very often reluctant to engage in technical/manual work.

The Standard for the Compulsory Education Curriculum was followed by the Vocational Education Law passed in April 2022. The latter states that students in vocational schools can attain a bachelor's degree. However, under a strong tradition of plus valuing certification and prejudice against occupational jobs, the incentives of the Vocational Education Law could end up being a lip service. It is not until a number of vocational schools provide a high-quality service and acquire prestige that students and parents will feel proud of vocational education (Gan, 2021).

3.4 Foreign languages

In March 2022, the Chinese Ministry of Education released the Standard for the Compulsory Education Curriculum (MOE, 2022b), which would enter into effect in just six months. Among its 16 subjects, the new curriculum assigns unprecedented weight to the physical education subject and its mode of instruction. Physical education lesson time in compulsory education appears now as the third only after the Chinese language and Mathematics. Some non-traditional and, perhaps, more leisurely sport disciplines such as skateboarding, frisbee, hiking and roller boarding are included in physical education courses (MOE, 2022c).

China is also making sizeable changes to English language education, which used to be focused on test-taking skills and, thus, caused proliferation of after-school English tutorials (Zhang, 2021). Primary school students in tutoring classes used to learn English grammar at the level of high schools. This caused inconvenience to primary school English teachers due to students' uneven levels of language skills within class. Furthermore, there now exist inconsistencies of curricular requirements and assessments at different levels in school English education (Jin et al., 2017). School English language education has long been in service of the overall framework of nation-building (Rong and Abdullah, 2022). For instance, the significance of “Stories of China retold in English” subject topic in enhancing China's international image has been a hot topic among Chinese researchers and teachers in recent years (Yuan et al., 2018). Some of them have argued that reiterated utterances on the excellence of the Chinese culture in language instruction implies that rather than global outlook and competitiveness, English should be a tool to highlight assertiveness as a nation-state. Not without a paradox, the Ministry of Education itself has explicitly indicated that, in order to foster the “international perspective” among students, it is important to understand the customs, the culture and the thinking mode of foreign countries (MOE, 2022d).

In addition, the new English education in the Standard for the Compulsory Education Curriculum might not be able to solve the problem of educational inequity. The closure of tutorial schools, the reduction of English lessons in schools and, yet, even higher requirements in the English Senior Secondary Admission Tests, pose challenges for teachers and students with less resources. The development and implementation of English language education in China has not only been a professional endeavour, but also a complex political process. The latter, it has been argued, requires a critical understanding of the English language and a careful negotiation with local languages from socio-cultural and socio-political perspectives (Jin et al., 2017; Fang, 2018).

3.5 Children back home

By banning the off-campus tutoring and turning private schools into less expensive public ones, the DRP brings students back to the public education system. It also means that a large number of students now go home after school instead of long hours in private tutorial centres. Students are now expected to receive more parental care. The National People's Congress passed the Family Education Promotion Law in October 2021, which officially sanctioned that parents should become responsible guardians and legally delimited the boundary between school education and family education (NPC, 2021).

With accelerating urbanisation, China witnesses a dramatic increase in the number of dual income families, consequently, parents have difficulties to take part in their children's learning and after school activities (Cheng, 2021). Partaking of different stakeholders in childcare have also changed. Most provinces across the country have explicitly increased parental leave for fathers, encouraging young fathers to devote more time to childcare. The expansion of parental leave reflects the political rationale and will to redeploying parental share of caregiving and education. Due to the DRP, there are now afternoon hours in which students are in-between schooling and parental care—schools started offering after-school services.

In sum, it is possible to identify a score of rationales and justifications of the DRP. They in turn have generated varied reactions from different education stakeholders.

4. Stakeholders' reaction

The fact that the DRP is issued not by the Ministry of Education but by the General Office of the Central Committee and the State Council only underscores the government's great determination. With such a novel and complex policy, unforeseen effects can be expected. The interplay between the state and other stakeholders of education surrounding the DRP generates different perceptions and reactions.

Ning and Yang (2022) reported some initial impacts of the DRP on homework and off-campus tutoring. They distributed 23,746 questionnaires to teachers, students and parents of primary and secondary schools across China. Their survey showed that shortly after the inception of the DRP, the amount of homework for primary and secondary school students was significantly reduced and students' ability to handle assignments, improved. The report also flagged some related challenges such as teachers' “new homework” design, parental expectations and issues in students' self-discipline.

The following subsections are from media reports, literature review and interviews with several teachers in public and private schools and the parents.

4.1 Parents

Supporters of the DRP indicate that the reform can solve several dated problems of education in China. However, for some others, the “bottle neck” of all such problems is yet to be solved—enrolment practices at different levels of the education system, higher education in particular. In China, competition begins the minute one is born, from getting into a school to getting a job. That is why parents scramble to find the best possible tutoring schools for their children. As off-campus tutoring reins in, non-discipline tutoring gets a leg up. Generally, Chinese parents regard an exam-oriented instruction as the best for pupils to obtain highest grades and get enrolled into prestigious schools. This has been widely criticised by its rote learning style in China and beyond, yet, as we will see, even the DRP is unlikely to resolve it. There is yet another entrenched belief among parents that quality education is more expensive, for example, a science lesson would be more expensive than a reading lesson.

In terms of enrolling children into prestigious schools, Chinese parents face a number of dilemmas. A quantitative research by Jin and Sun (2022) shows that some parents are even more anxious than before the DRP because they cannot track their children's progress at school. Most of them admit their inclination to continue seeking private tutors. This is because, until now, the authorities have not introduced any significant changes to the National College Entrance Examination (高考 Gāokǎo) system that dovetails well with the DRP. Those who are socioeconomically behind the starting line of the Gāokǎo are now told that, in addition to the examinable subjects, their children have to have all-round development in morality, physical fitness and art. We think that as long as the problems of test-based higher education enrolment system persists, parents would spare no efforts to carve out a better career path for their children. For those we talked to, the burden, education-related double burden, is far from over.

Related research echoes the above discussion. Tan et al. (2021) measured public attention to the DRP. They found out that Chinese netizens searching “Double Reduction” was the highest in three provinces (Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu), and the majority were women aged 30 to 39. Their research also suggests that parents in richer regions show more concern towards the DRP. It has been argued that the DRP affects no less the many “left behind” children in suburban and rural areas whose parents are migrant workers in cities (Jiang and Wang, 2021). Furthermore, despite the fact that both the DRP and the Family Promotion Law encourage parents to engage in children's learning process, parents with long working hours as well as those with less education may find it challenging to help their children at home, especially those in junior and senior high schools.

4.2 Local authorities

Different provinces in China have different degrees of autonomy in terms of the implementation of the DRP. Yang et al. (2023) suggested that the DRP provisions, particularly the comprehensive practical guidance, vary from region to region, with the well-developed regions displaying a higher level of policy coverage and local adaptations. For example, Shanghai adopts the “5 + 2 model” (2 h a day in 5 working days) to upgrade after-school service. Beijing promotes the rotation of cadres and teachers (Zhou and Qi, 2021).

In August 2021, the Shanghai Education Commission announced the cancellation of the English language exam at the end of the primary schooling term, leaving only Chinese and mathematics tests (Shanghai Education Committee, 2021). Guangzhou has proposed a stratified design for written assignments in compulsory education (Guangzhou Education Bureau, 2021), causing a panicky assignment design rush among teachers.

Since students have more free time now, education authorities try to prevent teenagers from indulging in the internet by setting a limitation to the online hours (China's National Press and Publication Administration, 2021). Some authorities also provide free online learning resources for the compulsory schooling sector with the intention of bridging the gaps in learning resources.

4.3 Private tutoring institutions

The New Oriental company, one of the largest private education providers in China, had to lay off tens of thousands of employees and its market value evaporated by 90% right after the release of the DRP (Ni and Zhu, 2022). As the mainstream tutoring is suppressed, private tutorial companies had to ramp up investments in tertiary education, education of Chinese students overseas and even sell agricultural products online. Xueersi, another tutoring giant, began to offer non-subject-based education programmes at a low price, which are cheaper than a cup of coffee. Ten months after the DRP inception, the New Oriental company started bilingual live-streaming sales, making the company's shares climb back sharply by 78% (Wang, 2022). It became apparent that policies against the English language subject do not douse parents' interest for it.

While some private tutoring institutions reacted to the DRP swiftly by closing down their operations, others have tried to adapt. Many of them have changed their time from weekends to weekdays. Some others changed their names and institutional profiles to, say, “Reading group”(读书会 Dúshūhuì), “Growth center”(成长中心 Chéngzhǎng zhōngxīn) and “Drama club”(戏剧社 Xìjùshè). According to the interviews conducted by Lin (2022) with owners of after school institutions in Wenzhou, Zhengjiang Province, these tutoring centres are trying to seek transition, shifting their focus to quality-oriented courses such as science and technology courses (programming, robots, etc), language art courses (debate, eloquence training, public speaking, etc), expanded studies (natural exploration, overnight exploration, etc.) and learning ability courses (memory, speed reading, mapping, etc).

Some institutions remain in operation in small cities (with less strict control) and parents have complained that the fees are even higher (Gu, 2022). Another adaptation is one-to-one tutoring but only for those wealthy parents who can afford it; it is common for them to have live-in tutors (住家教师 Zhùjiā jiàoshī) (Jin and Sun, 2022).

For the successful implementation of the DRP, it might be crucial to improve the efficiency of the local authorities' governance (Zhang, 2021). If the quality education gap continues to be very wide between urban and rural areas, several DRP-related reforms could be reversed prematurely, which often takes place subtly with “policy achievements” stated by the local government based on preliminary reports. Since it is common in China that after an early reaction, grassroots educational institutions do not follow a policy to the letter, there is a need for local governments to longitudinally monitor the DRP implementation.

4.4 Schools

The elimination of private tutorials has created a time vacuum. A consequence of the DRP has been, thus, an extended after-school service provided by schools and it was introduced nationwide soon after the release of the DRP. Again, there are some differences among different regions, reflecting some dated problems such as rural-urban, East-West and North-South economic divides (Yang et al., 2023). A former English teacher said:

student's dismissal [from school] is now extended by two to four hours from the original 17:00. During this time; teachers are required to carry out after-school homework, help and organize various activities to assist the children to have a uniform and practical after-school tutorial. However, the ensuing problems are that teachers' fees for remedial work are not uniform, the content of after-school tutorials is very different from that of the usual subjects, the types of after-school activities are challenging to plan and standardize effectively, and some students even feel more stressed than before because of the delay at the end of school hours. (Teacher XL)

Although students and teachers are now forced to attend this after-school service provided by the school, its content is rather questionable. Teachers are not allowed to teach subject-based lessons during those sessions, but only can they supervise self-study or doing homework by students while keeping the class quiet. If school teachers teach curriculum subjects, they might be reported by parents. These after-school service in school have also become a time for the children to goof off and play. Consequently, teachers and students alike feel like they are trapped and cannot wait for the school bell to ring.

To alleviate the burden of dual-income parents, some schools have started to implement a Hosting Service (托管服务Tuōguǎn fúwù) during summer breaks. Confining children to school all the time, however, is rather stressful for students and in detriment of their outside school socialisation.

While positively implementing the DRP in some aspects, schools still come up with every possible method to test students' learning. Tests are now run with inventive appellatives such as “Knowledge contest” (知识竞赛 Zhīshi jingsai), “Stage digestion” (阶段整理 Jiēduàn zhěnglǐ ) and “Core literacy show” (核心素养展示 Héxīnsùyǎng zhǎnshì). After the DRP, a primary school in Foshan, Guangdong organised a “Stage digestion” (阶段整理 Jiēduàn zhěnglǐ) among grade 1 and 2. One of the parents complained to the Education Bureau via the online business platform:

There are still mid-term examinations for all subjects including language, mathematics and English, but with different names and a strict invigilator whom my kid does not know … Doesn't the DRP require that there cannot be written exams in Years 1 and 2? Isn’t it against the DRP? (Toutiao.com, 2022)

In the comments section of the same post, a common one was that parents are negatively affected while they see school exams as a must. It comes to no surprise that parents turn a blind eye to the school's disguised tests since, in fact, they are very eager to learn about their children's test scores. Furthermore, if reported by parents, schools can easily justify their practice by saying that these exercises are an extension of their after-school service.

Although the Ministry of Education has set profit-related rules for private schools to convert into public schools, there are still private ones that meet the requirements to operate. For example, there are a few in Foshan Guangdong. These private schools are thriving with high demand because they have enough autonomy to hire former tutorial centre instructors to run their after-school activities as well as weekend/vacation activities. These after-school services have gained recognition as offering higher quality and comprehensive curriculum than those offered by public schools.

An increased dependency on school-based education might also uncover the gap in learning resources between urban, sub-urban and rural areas as it all now depends on school resources and the quality of teachers (Xue and Li, 2023). It is unlikely that teachers of tutorial institutions and private schools who lost their jobs due to the DRP would seek jobs in smaller cities or less developed areas. Although the DRP is not aimed at tackling the longstanding problem of a lack of education equity in rural areas, a possible way to alleviate this problem might be by drawing on the experience of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed students in remoter areas to have the same lessons conducted by the municipal education section. The use of e-learning such as public free online courses could be considered to narrow down the educational resource gap and/or provide a greater support for afterschool service.

4.5 Teachers

With up to 60 students in a class and long working hours, Chinese school teachers have long been struggling to meet the diverse needs of students. The DPR sets higher goals for teachers, namely achieving school-based all-round development, full participation and effective lesson design. Teachers are facing an unprecedented challenge in their careers as they have to figure out how to effectively reduce the burden of students while guaranteeing good academic performances and all-round development. A male primary teacher said:

In fact, it means that we need to improve kids' performance by assigning less homework, fewer examinations without grading or ranking them. We now issue students' papers with only grades (A-E) and no scores, which means that when I count the marks, I should first fill out the form and then convert it into a grade written on the paper. Many pupils you give him an E, he believes he’s 59, but he’s actually 19. But we need a copy of the grades to show the principals, to compare with other schools.

There is no provision under the DRP to support and to take care of school teachers so that they handle longer working hours and higher requirements in teaching design on top of high-stake test pressure such as the Middle Exam (中考 Zhōng kǎo) and the National College Entrance Examination (高考 Gāokǎo), which have not changed under the DRP. Moreover, there is no mention of a corresponding raise in teachers' salaries. Instead, school teachers are frequently questioned as being unprofessional and are pushed to take up more responsibilities (Luo, 2022).

Although the DRP prohibits streaming students into advanced and normal classes in schools, teachers asked to stratify their instructional design according to students' learning abilities. Apart from designing different activities and assignments to satisfy students different learning needs, teachers now need to juggle classroom management issues.

Another heavy load for teachers is the repetitive non-teaching tasks such as after-school meetings, evaluations and home-school communication. Most instructors indicated that once the DRP was implemented, they spent up to 11 h a day at school (Liu, 2022). In addition, the school-based after-school service is mostly provided by the teachers of the school. This practice varies among schools or regions, with some being entirely self-study sessions and others “Interest Classes” (兴趣班 X ìngqùbān) or “Extracurricular Group Activities” (社团课Shètuánkè). Although these activities add extra workload of teachers, the criteria for granting remuneration for their extended hours of work are not consistent across schools or regions, and the after-school extended hours fee system is poorly developed and opaque. A female primary school teacher in Guangdong province said:

A self-learning course charges 5 yuan fee per session per pupil. The full sum goes to the teacher. However, from the fee for an Interest Class is 28 yuan per student per session, which works out to 560 yuan for 20 students, only 200 yuan (USD 29) goes to the teacher.

In the Chinese social media, comments about teachers delivering after-school activities in school are not as positive. Whereas both students and teachers in after-school programmes must receive equitable educational service and remuneration for work done, the school-based after-school service has actually decreased teachers' morale.

5. Final remarks

The DRP has been implemented in the backdrop of an education philosophy that has traditionally prioritised diligence over giftedness with heavy parental reliance on schooling and private education (Park, 2011; Qiang, 2015). The DRP reflects or gets inspirations from the history, for instance, the “730 Education Reform” of South Korea by which the Korean government tried to reduce or eliminate shadow education through public tutoring services, but parents did not regard them as an effective alternative (Lee et al., 2010; Wu, 2021). South Korean parents hired personal tutors in imaginative ways to circumvent reporting, causing tutoring fees to soar. The policy was abolished 20 years later and, almost overnight, the South Korean private tutoring and training institutions bounced back (Lee et al., 2010).

Another historical precedence in the burden reduction education policy was Japan's Yutori-kyōiku, namely, “Relaxed Education” policy that had been mulled over since the 1980s and officially launched in April 2002. Meiko Lin summarises the consequences of the policy (2018, pp. 2–3):

Yutori curricular reforms constituted a 30% cut in instruction in core academic subjects (i.e. Japanese, mathematics, science), the implementation of a 5-day school week instead of a 6-day school week […] Between 1992 and 2002, at the elementary school level, time for teaching all subjects (except for ethics and special activities) was cut from 14% to 18%.

The Yutori policy repeatedly met public and media uproar over markedly low scores in the 2003 and 2006 OECD PISA, worsening student behaviour (violence and truancy) and excessive workload of teachers (Yu and Zhang, 2022; Zhang and Chen, 2022).

Although the South Korean, Japanese and Chinese policies discussed here were all partly motivated by a political will to lessen some longstanding burdens of education stakeholders, the formulation and implementation of the Chinese DRP outstand in several respects. In terms of formulation of the DRP, power holders' perception of possible threats to the power establishment were perhaps the most important raison d’être. Such threats include mega-issues such as demographics and the notorious widening gaps in income or wealth between richer and poorer Chinese households. They also comprise of some micro-level but no less menacing social issues such as a widespread discontent among the youth over a hardening inequality sans social mobility, also known as “lying flat” (躺平 Tǎng píng) and “letting it rot” (摆烂 Bǎi làn) attitude and “lying flat-ism” (躺平主义 Tǎngpíng zhûyì).

In terms of its implementation, the DRP, despite its opinion paper policy status, followed a prototypically authoritarian pathway, without public consultation and in “top-down and by surprise” fashion. Arguably, this is the reason why the DRP was followed by many corollary regulations that impacted indirectly related fields and industries, for example, huge loss in the market value of internationally renowned tech-companies that were already under pressure due to the “Common Prosperity” ideology. Similarly, due to the way the DRP was initially implemented, its policy structure needed to add structural elements and legal corollaries. Thus, several laws both within and without the field of education were promulgated such as the already discussed the Standard for the Compulsory Education Curriculum Law, Vocational Education Law, Vocational Education Law and the Family Education Promotion Law.

In terms of the processes and practices of the DRP, we offered in this paper the artefacts, such as language, timing and contexts of the policy. Growing related literature as well as the early reactions of different stakeholders of education presented here suggest that perhaps any one stakeholder could hardly solve the many intertwined problems that the DRP policy intends to address. In regard to the education sector, it seems crucial for the government to develop partnership with mainstream schools, parents and even private enterprises.

It is possible to argue that the targeted “burdens” are not really gone but only changed hands. The DRP also generated new burdens for Chinese parents who are now searching for alternative learning opportunities for their children whereas the high-stake exam bottleneck is unlikely to be reformed any time soon. In addition, many tutoring centre workers lost their jobs because of the DRP and it calls for a better provision for them albeit late. In a similar vein, an equitable resource allocation and fair remuneration for current school teachers should be gradually materialised. In conclusion, China has been implementing the DRP for almost three years, and we believe that the Chinese government will make adjustments to the policy after listening to the voices of different stakeholders of education.