Wanmen University

» see wanmen.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Wanmen started as something genuinely good. A physics student at Peking University began posting university course material on a public page on Renren, the Chinese social network that everyone at a Chinese university was on in 2012, and the material was the real thing rather than exam cram sheets. The name translates roughly as ten thousand gates, and the stated goal was to lower the cost of a university-grade education in China to nothing.

Renren liked it enough to put two million dollars of angel money behind it, and in 2014 it came off the social network and became an independent company with its own site and app. It grew to over thirteen million registered users and more than 1,700 courses, a lot of them still free, covering the first two years of a science degree in a way very little else in Chinese did.

What changed was how it was paid for. Free courses do not fund a company with offices and salaried instructors, and somewhere in the middle of that decade the model turned into selling very long memberships in advance.

~ the record ~

~ the physics student ~

Tong Zhe took a silver medal in the national physics olympiad at nineteen and went to Peking University to study physics, then to the École Polytechnique in Paris. He was offered a PhD place at ETH Zurich and turned it down to come back to China and build an education company, which in 2012 was a defensible decision and is the detail every profile written after 2022 leads with.

The company nearly died once already. During the 2015 stock market crash the funding dried up, and Tong kept it alive on personal loans. His mother sold an apartment in Xiamen and lent him over a million yuan. A friend from high school lent him three million more. Those are not the numbers of a fraud operation, they are the numbers of someone who believed the thing would work, which is what makes the ending harder to file.

~ what a lifetime cost ~

I found this one on a Chinese category list of sites that closed in 2022, which is how most of the graves from that side of the internet reach this file. Everything below is out of Chinese reporting published in the weeks after.

By 2021 the pricing had become the product. A one-year VIP ran ¥6,498. A lifetime VIP ran ¥21,999, which is well over three thousand US dollars and roughly a year of disposable income for the students it was aimed at, and about thirty thousand people had bought one by August of that year.

Then there was the scholarship plan. You paid a further ¥9,999 to ¥14,999 on top, and the money came back to you if you completed 3,600 hours of study, a target set high enough that most people would never reach it and low enough to sound achievable when you signed. Around thirty-two thousand people were in it. A great many of them were paying in installments through Huabei or JD Finance, which means that after the company disappeared they were still making monthly payments on courses that no longer existed.

~ the morning of the twenty-second ~

The regulatory context was the double reduction policy of July 2021, which took Chinese private tutoring apart deliberately and wiped out most of the sector inside a year. Staff at Wanmen's branch offices later said they had been told the policy would not affect the company much.

On 22 March 2022 the WeChat VIP groups were dissolved in the early hours, the app would not accept logins, and it came off the app stores. Students reached the registered office and found it empty. Tong Zhe's phone was off and his WeChat account was deleted, February salaries had not been paid and social insurance contributions had stopped. More than three thousand users filed complaints. State television reported on it on 27 March and said the amount involved kept growing as investigators worked through it. Several of the instructors, without the company, quietly reopened access to their own courses for the students who had paid.

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