How do I teach English online to students in mainland China?
Yes — independent online tutors teach students in mainland China every day, and the workflow works, but it isn't quite the same as teaching students in Europe or North America. Three constraints shape it: connectivity (the Great Firewall blocks or throttles many Western services, so your teaching platform needs routing that works inside mainland China), payments (most Chinese families don't use international credit cards — you'll either invoice through a platform that accepts WeChat Pay or take payment through a domestic intermediary), and time zones (China runs UTC+8 nationwide with no daylight saving, so most after-school lesson slots in Beijing land in the early morning for US tutors and mid-morning for UK and European tutors). The 2021 "Double Reduction" policy reshaped the large agency/institutional side of the market but did not end independent foreign tutors teaching individual families directly. Pick a platform that's been built with the Chinese internet in mind, sort out WeChat-compatible payment up front, and you can run a stable practice.
Why teaching mainland-China students is different from teaching anywhere else
If you've taught students in other countries, three things will surprise you the first month:
- The internet in mainland China is heavily filtered. Many Western consumer services — Google (Search, YouTube, Gmail, Meet, Calendar, Drive, Classroom, Workspace), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — are not reachable from mainland China without a VPN. Using a VPN as a student is increasingly unreliable: it slows the connection, drops mid-call, and is something many families would rather not install on a child's device. So your teaching tool needs to either be reachable natively from inside mainland China or run through routing built for it.
- Payments don't move through cards the way they do elsewhere. WeChat Pay and Alipay are the dominant rails; international credit cards are uncommon among non-affluent families and refused by many domestic accounts. Charging a Chinese parent USD on a Stripe card payment fails more often than it works. Build the payment path before you sell the first lesson package.
- One time zone, no daylight saving. All of mainland China runs UTC+8 year-round. Most school-age students do tutoring between 4 PM and 9 PM Beijing time on school nights, peaking 6-8 PM after dinner. For a tutor in New York that maps to 4-9 AM the same calendar day; in London to 9 AM-2 PM the same day; in Central Europe to 10 AM-3 PM the same day. Weekend mornings (9 AM-noon Beijing) are also common, especially for younger students.
Will my video platform work in mainland China?
Some Western tools work; some don't; many work intermittently. The widely-documented picture, which is worth knowing before you commit a family to a tool:
- Google services — including Google Meet, Google Classroom, Google Calendar, and Gmail — are not accessible in mainland China without a VPN. This rules out the entire Google Workspace stack as a primary teaching tool for students in China.
- YouTube is blocked. Any YouTube video embedded in your lesson — a song, a phonics video, a clip you wanted to play — will not load for the student. If you need a video they can watch outside the lesson, post it on Bilibili or YouKu (Tencent Video) instead.
- Skype has been unstable since at least 2017 (when it was removed from Chinese app stores), with on/off availability since. Don't plan on it as the primary tool.
- Standard zoom.us has been highly variable. Zoom suspended direct sales of new accounts to mainland-China users in mid-2020 and now serves the Chinese market through licensed local partners ("Zoom for China"). You, as a foreign tutor, are typically on the global Zoom; your student is joining your global Zoom meeting from inside China, which works for some students most of the time and for others not at all. Some tutors report it as fine; some report frequent drops. Both are real reports.
- Smaller virtual-classroom tools vary widely. Some have built routing through Hong Kong, Singapore, or Tokyo and stay reasonably reliable; some haven't, and will time out for your student. The only honest test is to run one full real lesson with a student in China before you commit a family to a platform.
What works: a virtual classroom built with the Chinese internet in mind
A small number of teaching-specific virtual classrooms have invested in infrastructure designed for mainland China — typically a proxy in Hong Kong or another Asia-Pacific region, plus separately routed handling for any third-party services embedded in the classroom (a video stream, a shared browser, lesson recordings). Koala Go is one of these. We won't claim we're the only one; we'll describe what we actually do, and you can test it against alternatives.
What we've built for mainland-China teaching:
- A China-routed access path. Beyond the global
classroom.teachwithkoala.comdomain, we operate a Hong Kong proxy (running on Alibaba Cloud's Hong Kong region) that routes classroom traffic into mainland China. Students who would otherwise hit a wall on the global URL can join lessons through the China-routed path. As the tutor you don't need to configure anything special — if a student is having trouble connecting, our support team can point them at the right route. - Region-aware cobrowser sessions with explicit mainland-China handling. The cobrowser (where you and your student act on the same live webpage together) is region-aware: you set a default region (North America, Europe, or Asia) once in your settings, and the session is routed accordingly, with separate handling for mainland-China clients inside the Asia region. For a one-off lesson in another region, you can switch the region in the lesson without ending it.
- Audio is piped through the lesson's audio device. A YouTube replacement video, a phonics clip, or anything else playing inside the cobrowser comes out through the same audio path you and the student are already on, rather than negotiating a separate WebRTC stream that's more likely to fail in a constrained-network environment.
- Built-in invoicing accepts WeChat Pay end-to-end. You generate an invoice from inside the classroom; the parent receives the link and pays it on WeChat. There are a couple of WeChat gotchas, the biggest being that WeChat refuses a payment if the QR code is scanned with the same WeChat app it was generated in — parents need to display the QR on one device and scan it from a second one. We've written that flow up at /wechat-pay-instructions and you can forward that page to any family that hits a snag.
- White-label/B2B routing for tutoring companies. If you're running a school rather than tutoring solo, the Koala for Business product lets you brand the classroom on your own domain, with the same Hong Kong routing applied. Nihaoma Mandarin, an online Mandarin school for children, runs this way; their students and parents see only the Nihaoma experience.
Honest caveat: connectivity into mainland China is not a fully solved problem and we don't claim flawlessness. Some lessons still see slow connections, black frames, or freezes for students on weaker domestic connections. A meaningful minority of tutors on our 2026 product/market-fit survey flagged China-related connectivity as a real ongoing issue. The team tracks reports and responds in-lesson when something breaks — that responsiveness is the lever, not a claim of perfection. Plan a 2-3 minute connection buffer at the start of each lesson, and have a fallback audio plan (a WeChat voice call works on the parent's phone if the video tool fails) for the occasional lesson that won't come up.
How do I get paid by parents in mainland China?
Parents in mainland China generally cannot pay you with an international credit card. Three working approaches, cleanest first:
- Invoice through a platform that natively accepts WeChat Pay. This is the lowest-friction path for the family — they get a link, they pay it on the WeChat app they already use, you get paid in your local currency. Koala Go's built-in invoicing supports WeChat Pay end-to-end and the parent-facing instructions are at /wechat-pay-instructions. The main gotcha (worth telling parents up front): if the parent scans the WeChat QR with the same phone the email was opened on, WeChat will block the payment as a security measure. They need a second device — typically, open the email on a computer or iPad, then scan the QR with the phone.
- Stripe with WeChat Pay enabled — if you're in a supported country. Stripe supports WeChat Pay as a payment method for businesses in a list of countries (the US, the UK, Hong Kong, much of Europe, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Canada, and others; the list changes over time). If you have a Stripe Connect account in one of those countries, you can request WeChat Pay on your account directly. Check Stripe's current docs before you assume availability — country support drifts.
- A local intermediary. Some tutors take payment through a tutoring agency that handles the Chinese-side rails for a cut; through a Chinese friend's domestic WeChat or Alipay account; or via a multi-currency service (Wise sometimes works for parents who have a foreign bank account; PayPal rarely does for families inside mainland China). Each adds friction; each works for some tutors and not others.
Whichever path you choose, decide before lesson 1. Don't run a trial lesson and then try to figure out payment at the end — you'll either delay yourself a week or end up giving the lesson away.
What time should I schedule lessons for students in China?
China runs a single time zone (UTC+8) year-round, with no daylight saving since 1991. Practical implications:
- Weekday after-school slots: 4-9 PM Beijing time. Peak is around 6-8 PM, after dinner. For tutors elsewhere this maps roughly to: US East Coast 4-9 AM, US West Coast 1-6 AM, UK 9 AM-2 PM, Central Europe 10 AM-3 PM, Sydney 6-11 PM. (Northern-hemisphere DST shifts the US/UK/EU numbers by an hour for half the year.)
- Weekend morning slots: 9 AM-noon Beijing. Common for younger students and the families that don't have school on Saturday. For Europe this is the very early morning; for US tutors it's the previous evening.
- Early-morning before-school slots: 7-8 AM Beijing, occasionally for very young students. UK and European tutors do well here.
- School holidays. Summer break runs roughly mid-July to late August; winter break is ~3 weeks around Chinese New Year (date moves each year, late Jan to mid-Feb). Lesson density rises in breaks; lesson density falls during the National Day holiday in early October.
If the only viable Beijing slot for you is the small hours of your own morning, decide whether the rate justifies the schedule cost before you take the first lesson. Switching out later is harder than people expect — families plan around your slot.
Is online tutoring to mainland China still legal and viable after the 2021 regulations?
Short version: yes for independent foreign tutors teaching individual families across borders, but the rules have evolved and continue to evolve. The 2021 "Double Reduction" policy (双减政策, July 2021) restricted for-profit private tutoring of compulsory-education-subjects (K-9 academic subjects) inside mainland China, with particular emphasis on tutoring agencies and platforms holding licenses inside China. The institutional/agency side of the market — companies like VIPKid, GoGoKid, and DaDa — was reshaped substantially in 2021-2022.
What the policy did not categorically end is independent foreign tutors teaching individual families directly across borders. Most of the working indie ESL tutors we see today operate this way. But the picture keeps shifting: enforcement varies by region, the line between "compulsory subject" and "interest" tutoring matters, and rules around foreign teachers operating local Chinese entities have changed. If you're a casual tutor with a handful of students, you're operating at low risk; if you're scaling toward a registered business with paid staff inside China, get local legal advice. Don't treat a Q&A page (including this one) as a definitive compliance answer.
A practical checklist before your first lesson with a student in China
- Run a real test connection 24 hours before lesson 1, on the device the student will use, from the room the lesson will happen in. If something is going to fail, surface it then.
- Agree on the payment rail before you sell a package. WeChat Pay through the classroom, Stripe-with-WeChat-Pay if you're eligible, or a local intermediary — pick one and walk the parent through it.
- Use a teaching platform with mainland-China routing. If the platform doesn't say anything about how it handles the Chinese internet, assume it doesn't and test before committing a family.
- Have a fallback audio plan. A WeChat voice call from the parent's phone is the simplest backup if the video tool won't come up for a single lesson.
- Anchor recurring lessons in Beijing time, not yours. The family's UTC+8 slot is the constant; your local time will drift across DST boundaries and your recurring calendar invite will sometimes shift the wrong way if you set it in your zone.
- Use WeChat for casual messages, email for anything you want a record of. WeChat is how the family will reply most reliably; email is where the receipts and lesson notes belong.
- Plan around the lunar calendar. Chinese New Year, Mid-Autumn, and the National Day holiday will quietly disappear a week of lessons each — build them into the package terms.
Where Koala Go fits
If you've read this far, the honest summary is: teaching mainland-China students through Koala Go works for most lessons most days, the cobrowser and WeChat Pay invoicing and the Hong Kong routing remove the biggest stack-juggling problems you'd have on Zoom plus four bolted-on tools, and connectivity is not 100% solved — we don't pretend otherwise. About 81% of teachers on our 2026 product/market-fit survey said they'd be very disappointed without Koala Go (the same figure we publish on our main landing page); a meaningful minority of those teachers also reported China-related connectivity issues we're actively working on. Both things are true at once.
If you'd like to try it with a student already in China before committing a family, open a free Koala Go room at classroom.teachwithkoala.com — no install — and run a real lesson. If you have a specific question about a city, a school grade, or a particular setup (a tutoring company brand on its own domain, a hybrid where some students are in China and some aren't), write to koala@teachwithkoala.com with a sentence about how you teach and we'll give you our honest read.