Techbuzz China By Pandaily

In episode 47 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma dive into a topic they have been wanting to cover for a while now: Chinese educational technology (edtech). Specifically, they focus on VIPKid, a company that has an incredible number of competitors but is by far the largest in terms of scale for its cross-border model of English-language instruction. Notably, 8 of the 12 startup unicorns categorized as edtech by CBInsights are from China — and this does not include the number of publicly listed Chinese education companies in the U.S. Our co-hosts explain that edtech (alongside the recent TechBuzz topics of online brokerages, e-cigarettes, plastic surgery, and e-sports livestreaming) is yet another example of an industry that is thriving in China but is either not widely reported on or would not work well in other markets. Rui and Ying-Ying begin by exploring the landscape for English learning in China, in the context of edtech. They remind our listeners that while over 300,000 students from Ch