The State of Online Teaching in China in 2022

On January 1^st teachers for DaDaABC taught their last classes. The online English teaching company has closed their doors and their website now says “technical maintenance”. Since the announcement made by the Chinese government in July 2021 many companies have been closing. SayABC, Landi, Whales English ABC360, GoGoKid (owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance) and Zebra English have now completely shutdown.

Other large English teaching companies, such as Magic Ears, appear to be closing this year after they honour all their contracts with students.

According to the new laws foreign teachers who live outside of China are no longer able to give classes to Chinese children. Some companies are trying to adapt to the new laws. VIPKid, the industry giant who at one point had more than 70,000 American and Canadian teachers, now appear to be shifting to teaching students from around the world in an attempt to hold on to some of their business. These “global” students would be able book teachers from any country unlike their Chinese counterparts.  BlingABC is doing something similar as they have many students outside of China, mostly in Thailand and North America. Qkids and Palfish are other companies continuing with fewer students from outside of China.

If you are an English teacher living in China you are in luck, as the demand for online classes has increased. Some companies (Whales English) were encouraging English teachers to move to China just to teach online. Other teachers have run out of luck not only losing their job but there are reports of some companies (Landi and eHailuo/eHello) not even paying the final pay check for a month’s work.

These new regulations only affect companies teaching Chinese children. Adult students are still able to take English classes although there are fewer companies proving this service. Many European English teaching companies have not scaled back their operations in China. For now it appears that adults in China are only taking online business English classes provided by their employers

So, even after a terrible 2021 for online English teachers to Chinese students, it is highly unlikely that the market will recover in 2022. Losing such a huge market has sent ripples through the industry and the supply of online teachers (partly due to the pandemic) has increased dramatically. The market for teaching children online is saturated and from my point of view the only markets with increasing demand are the business English and exam preparation markets.