I confess that I had never heard of VIPKid before this news item; it just goes to show how widespread and varied our field is that a $3 billion company can slip between the cracks Anyhow, this current item says that the company's move is "perhaps the highest-profile example of the fallout from the Chinese government's introduction, in summer 2021, of sweeping regulations (called the shuangjian reforms) to curtail private and online tutoring for Chinese children in the country." VIPKids is a platform that connected "English-speaking tutors (many of whom are American) and Chinese children." It continues to operate in other countries and also to tutor adults in China (as the reforms covered only children). While "many observers speculate that the Chinese government wanted to curtail Western influence on its youngest minds" my own feeling that the official objective of "stopping education operations from putting profits ahead of the welfare of students" is probably more accurate.
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