Filipinos paid less than Americans but all had to ‘smile all the time’ – documentary shows China’s online English industry flaws and fallout from its collapse
- China’s US$100 billion online English tutoring industry had ‘Rolls-Royce’ and ‘General Motors’ companies that employed North Americans and Filipinos respectively
- Pay disparity, demand to be always ‘animated’, and the effect on teachers from different backgrounds of the industry’s sudden crash are shown in English Hustle
For his documentary English Hustle, filmmaker Charles Abelmann initially set out to document the lives of some of the 100,000 teachers in the United States, and a handful of the 3 million Chinese children they taught online through fast-growing tutoring companies in China collectively worth US$100 billion.
“Initially I was motivated by the size of the industry, like how many teachers there were, how many kids there were, and that it hadn’t gotten a lot of attention from the education side, and plenty of attention from investors. There are hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at this, and yet, it was unregulated,” says the educational researcher on a video call from Washington, in the United States.
Then, in July 2021, everything changed overnight as Beijing implemented its “double reduction” education reform. In an aim to free students from excessive classes and homework, the policy banned classes on weekends and holidays, and prevented for-profit tutoring companies from raising money in the stock market and from having foreign investors. As a result, tens of thousands of their teachers were laid off.
English Hustle accordingly ended up charting the rise and fall of the lucrative industry, which, even before the government crackdown on private tutoring schools, was plagued with issues.