The Foreign Teachers Caught Up in China’s Education Clampdown

In June, Jay finally caught a flight back to South Africa after several harrowing months spent in a detention center in East China. Her crime: Teaching English without a permit.

The 28-year-old, who is speaking to Sixth Tone on condition of anonymity, is one of several foreign nationals that have been detained during a government crackdown on teachers working illegally at extra-curricular cram schools.teaching jobs in China for foreigners

Private language schools have been routinely circumventing Chinese employment law for years to save time and money when recruiting foreign teachers. In 2017, China’s Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs estimated that of the 400,000 foreign citizens teaching in the country, only one-third had a valid work permit.

But last August, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, released a document ordering officials to tighten supervision on after-school training centers to ensure “the employment of foreigners … abides by the country’s stipulations,” triggering training center inspections across the country. The crackdown has intensified this year, with local governments launching further inspections and warning parents to look into teachers’ qualifications.

Jay was among the first teachers to be affected, and her story is a telling example of how supervision of the education sector has tightened, but the crackdown fails to deter schools and teachers from ignoring the country’s visa policies.

The young South African had been working at King’s International English — an English training center in the eastern city of Rui’an, Zhejiang province — for nearly a year when local officials came to inspect the school last September.Like several of her colleagues at King’s, Jay did not qualify for a work permit. Though she is a native English speaker, she had neither a Bachelor’s degree nor the two years’ teaching experience or necessary teaching qualifications.

King’s got around this problem by setting up a shell company and naming Jay an executive, then helping her apply for a business visa. Public business registration records show that six of the company’s seven executives were foreign nationals.

When officials uncovered the shell company, they cancelled Jay’s visa and gave her a 3,000 yuan ($423) fine for illegal employment. But that was not the end of her China career. Just weeks later, King’s offered to help Jay return to China, this time on a student visa. She accepted, and by October she was back teaching classes in Rui’an.

Jay understood she was taking a big risk but says she missed her friends and students in China — and her salary. King’s paid her 10,000 to 13,000 yuan per month, triple the amount she made at home. “I absolutely loved my job,” she says. “And I thought if I got caught, then I would just get deported.”

There are signs that other schools are willing to continue flouting the rules. Although the crackdown led to high-profile arrests of recruiters who had placed unqualified teachers in kindergartens in Beijing and Chongqing this year, multiple agencies are openly advertising English teaching jobs for non-native speakers and non-degree holders in China on Dave’s ESL Café, a popular online jobs portal.

The demand for foreign teachers among private language schools remains enormous, as many centers consider having overseas staff essential to their business, an agent surnamed Hu, who declined to give his first name for privacy reasons, tells Sixth Tone.