Chinese parents buy education and properties in Thailand as international school fees at home rise

Chinese parents keen to enrol their children in international schools but reluctant to pay the exorbitant tuition fees in the mainland are turning to Thailand as an option, a trend that has bolstered the local property market.

Peggy Wang, a mother of a 10-year old girl and six-year old boy, is one such parent who opted to move to the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where annual tuition fees at less than 60,000 yuan (US$8,732) are a quarter of the 240,000 yuan her children’s Beijing bilingual school had charged.

“The teachers in the Beijing school change frequently, but in Thailand, teachers have families there, so the faculty is stable,” Wang said. “In Beijing, my children have to take extra English classes after school in the absence of an English-speaking environment outside class, but not in Thailand.”

She plans to send her children to international schools in Bangkok when they get older, where fees will rise to about 100,000 yuan a year. To prepare for that, she has bought a 31 square metre flat in Bangkok for 650,000 yuan, in addition to the Chiang Mai villa she lives in and a flat in Pattaya.

Wang is among a growing group of Chinese parents disillusioned by the costs of local international schools and the rote-learning in public schools in the mainland, and looking towards Thailand as a destination for education and investment.