New career opportunity: You might want to become an online tutor!
by Ke Jin
After a physics teacher posted his tutoring video online for under two dollars. 2,617 students paid up, earning him RMB 18,842 (USD 2,915) an hour.
The online tutoring business is booming due to its easy access and affordable price. Wang Yu from Shandong Province is one of the popular online tutors, and he said his monthly income surpasses RMB 200,000.
While a spokesman from the Nanjing Education Bureau said online tutoring is “breaking the rules” and should be banned, it is nevertheless welcomed by many teachers and parents in China.
A tutee said he chose online classes out of dissatisfaction with local teaching resources.
According to Askci.com, nearly 100 million people use online education in China, and the number is expected to surpass 120 million in 2017, making the market worth over USD 100 billion.
Real scandal! 9.9 billion packing boxes used by Chinese per year
By Danielle Li
China is ranked the number-one country for package deliveries with a total of 20 billion parcels sent last year, according to the State Post Bureau of China. But behind the success of China’s e-commerce industry that is driving this huge volume of deliveries lies a horrendous amount of packaging that gets wasted. According to the Central News Agency of Taiwan, calculating from the total volume of parcels delivered, mainland China may have consumed as much as 2.96 billion woven sacks, 8.26 billion plastic bags, 9.9 billion packing boxes and 16.95 billion meters of tape. These staggering numbers made this one of the hottest topics on Weibo this week.
According to the news report, most express companies and e-commerce companies don’t have recycling plans for packaging materials. Boxes are recyclable, but low profits in doing it draw few companies to do so. Tape and fillers are directly dumped.
But a netizen mentioned that there is one online supermarket, The Store (Yihao Dian), that encourages users to engage in its box recycling plan by giving 50 points to their accounts when they use the plan.
For a breadwinner, life can be hard…
By Ke Jin
You graduate from college, get a job, and, if you’re lucky, get married at age 30. Before you retire at 60, you’ve got about 30 years where you’re fighting to support your family. How much money do you need to do this?
An infographic on Weibo gives a laundry list of expenses for an ordinary life in Beijing. First, you may want to live in an average apartment and get a new car every ten years. And you have to raise the young and care for the old, cover daily expenses, go to a movie or on vacation from time to time, and on top of that, you have to save for life after retirement. That would cost RMB 6.93 million (USD 1.07 million), at least! One must have a mininum monthly income of RMB 19,250 to live comfortably. And FYI, Beijing’s average monthly income varies around RMB 6,500.
Browsing through Weibo, you’ll find many netizens complaining that “life is hard…”
But cheer up! It wouldn’t be wonderful if it was easy!
Scratch lottery for knowledge sharing?
By Danielle Li
China’s Quora-like website Zhihu launched a surprise product for April Fools’ Day and it went viral on WeChat Moments. This product is also called “zhihu” in pinyin, but the name in Chinese characters is different and means “worth it”. The idea of this product is to share knowledge and experience while at the same time earning some money.
The founder of Zhihu, Zhou Yuan said he sold the WeChat ID of Sogou’s CEO, Wang Xiaochuan and it earned him tens of thousands of yuan.
How did he do it? First, think of some information that you think people would be eager to know, like a famous person’s WeChat ID; cover the most valuable part of the information with a mosaic; post this information on Zhihu and send it to your friends through WeChat. Then others have to pay several yuan to “scratch” the covered part for the information.
The funny thing is Wang later reported that post by Zhou to Zhihu, and is himself selling his WeChat ID. I paid RMB 10 and did get his WeChat ID! It’s xxxxx (please pay RMB 20 for this).
(Top photo from taopic.com)
