The last summer of tutoring: China's education sector faces a shrinking future

China's education sector is living through what one commentator calls its 'last summer.' The metaphor, borrowed from Hermann Hesse's 1919 novel Klingsor's Last Summer, frames an industry watching its era of effortless expansion wind down.

The numbers behind the mood are stark. China's annual births fell from 17.86 million in 2016 to roughly 7.92 million a decade later — a drop of more than half. As the essay notes, the decline 'lands in a classroom' only years later, reshaping who shows up, how schools are staffed and what families expect.

For much of the past two decades, Chinese education rode a wave of urbanization, internet adoption and rising household spending. Growth was treated as self-justifying: an industry that only had to keep moving forward to keep moving. The piece argues that when the world stops expanding outward, institutions must look inward — toward deeper expertise, longer relationships and things harder to replace.

It also reads the rise of AI as a new kind of fire: powerful, untrained in being human, yet able to write, draw and compute. The lesson from humanity's 1.5-million-year relationship with fire, the author suggests, is not to abandon the tool but to learn to live with it — and, in the process, to rediscover what does not look like a machine.

The throughline is a question for an entire industry: when 'more' is no longer guaranteed, what is worth protecting? The essay offers no roadmap, only the observation that summers end — and that the endings are rarely announced.