|
|
China, the country known for imposing strict limits on the number of offspring produced, is relaxing those limits in order to deal with a demographic imbalance, while at the same time exercising more control over children’s education.
The Wall Street Journal, in an article appearing 25 June, reports that a once-in-a-decade census published in May revealed that China is facing a shrinkage in its working-age population along with an increase in older people.
Concern Over Falling Birth Rate
Also in May, at a meeting of the Communist Party’s Politburo, President Xi Jinping said that China’s falling birthrate was a potential threat to the country’s national security. The government later announced that married couples would now be permitted to have up to three children, although doing away with birth limits altogether is under consideration.
Education for All
The government is also imposing tighter regulations on private education, to ensure that education remains under control of the state. China now has a significant urban population with enough money to invest in their children’s education, and this has created a boom in private tutoring.
As noted in our article of 8 June, “‘SMART LAMP’ A BIG HIT IN CHINA,” “Chinese parents have always felt immense societal pressure over their children’s education.” But now the Chinese government is not so sure that such pressure is a good thing.
Private education has flourished with the help of investments from Chinese technology companies. Now private education is being regulated by the state; no longer, for example, will private tutoring be permitted to take place during school holidays.
There will be new licensing requirements for teachers at private schools, government restrictions on homework loads, and even guidelines for after-school activities, all under the control of the Education Ministry.
And the competition to get one’s child into a top school has resulted in real estate speculation in the most desirable school districts, heating up an already stressed housing market.
TRENDPOST: The government’s reaction is to enact more regulations because it sees private education and the real estate frenzies as driving up the overall cost of education and thus impeding its goal of encouraging more births.
And while in the United States, where anti-trust regulations that prohibited monopolies and oligopolies from controlling commerce have been dismantled, in communist China, the country’s technology industry is under attack by the State Administration for Market Regulation, which is on an anti-monopoly mission and has levied millions of dollars in fines on educational startups backed by technology firms.
Thus, to address its demographic dilemma and ostensibly to drive down the cost of education, China is, it seems, at war with both private education and its own technology sector as its mission appears to be, equality for all. Indeed, with its middle class now approaching nearly 500 million, the government wants it to expand since the more money people make, the more they will spend, and that in turn will drive up the nation’s gross domestic product.