Educational elitism is an issue to be tackled, the necessity of which has already been widely established but reinforced amid COVID-19 pandemic given that learning has been greatly disrupted; elitism in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is a matter of debate, the settling of which still awaits more empirical studies in different educational contexts. Conducted in a particular Chinese higher education provider, this mixed-methods study examined the effects of CLIL in an online English teaching programme and indicated that when teaching practices were appropriately designed and enacted in response to learners' differing needs, students of different academic capabilities could make remarkable achievement in both language learning and content learning. This makes a contribution, though small, toward dispelling the myth of elitism in CLIL and establishes some evidence on the promotion of inclusive education in the time of COVID-19 crisis. However, a critical view should be held to elitism in either online education or CLIL with a much wider research agenda in various educational contexts to be explored. [For the complete proceedings, see ED626149.]