The “thunderstorm” of Beijing YOUTH Education, which has 1,000 schools across the country, continues to fester.
Hundreds of parents and advocates gathered at the YOUTH Education headquarters in Beijing’s Chaoyang business district on Monday, demanding refunds and compensation for unpaid wages. Police set up a cordon and clashed with protesters, and at least one person was taken away.
The rare parent-initiated protest briefly blocked the road, according to Hong Kong’s English-language South China Morning Post and other news outlets. Protesting parents shouted in unison, “Give back the money. After at least one of the protesters was removed from the scene, there were chants of “let them go. Later, the police released the man.
There was a large police presence and a cordon was set up. A large number of parents and many police officers were reportedly still present until dinner time. The report said that parents lost tens of thousands of dollars in prepaid tuition fees and hundreds of thousands of dollars in prepaid tuition fees.
Caijing.com reported that the day before, on October 18, when some parents went to the Beijing headquarters of YOUTH Education for tuition refunds, they found that the headquarters had been emptied, leaving only tables, chairs and benches stacked on top of each other, suspected of running away. The reporter repeatedly called the company headquarters and customer service refund teacher, the other party did not respond. But the company’s official micro-blog on October 17, said that YOUTH education is not bankrupt, and will get better and better.
According to the public data, YOUTH Education was founded in 1999, and established Education Research Institute in 2006, with a large number of front-line teachers and education experts as teaching and research team, with “personalized education” in thousands of campuses in major cities across the country.
According to some reports, Yosun Education has been involved in numerous disputes across China since the second half of 2019, mainly related to difficulties in refunding training fees, irregularities in school operation, and non-payment of wages to employees. In 2020, the epidemic in the first half of the year will have a serious impact on the education and training industry, and Yosun Education, which mainly focuses on offline training, will be the first to bear the brunt.
The founder of YOUTH, Chen Hao, issued a public statement in April this year, apologizing for defaulting on wages and saying that he would bear the losses of parents and employees.
However, since then, the media has been exposing the frequent suspensions and closures of Yosun’s campuses across the country, and the difficulty of refunding fees to parents.
On October 13, Beijing Haidian District Market Supervision Administration issued a consumer alert, in which seven education and training institutions were named, and the one with the highest number of complaints was Beijing Yosun Brilliant Education Technology Co.
Some parents reported that the unrefunded tuition fees of Yosun Education’s Beijing Guangqumen campus alone exceeded 9 million yuan.
The South China Morning Post report said that Yosun is the latest of a number of Chinese private education institutions to be hit by the 2020 neoconavirus outbreak. The offline education and training sector has been particularly hard hit by the epidemic, with many companies shutting down due to epidemic preparedness closures and social alienation.
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