China's cram schools: students desperate to pass China's do-or-die college entrance exam flock to schools that eliminate all distractions with military precision.

• Author: Larmer, Brook
• Position: Cover story

At precisely 11:45 on a Sunday morning last spring, thousands of teenagers swarmed out of the front gate of Maotanchang High School. Many of them wore identical black-and-white jackets emblazoned with the slogan, in English, "I believe it, I can do it."

Maotanchang High School is one of China's "cram schools"--a memorization factory where 20,000 students train around the clock for China's national college-entrance examination, known as the gaokao. In some ways, the gaokao is like the SAT or ACT, but it's more than twice as long and the stakes are much higher: Given every June over several days, the test is the only thing that matters for admission to Chinese universities.

For the students at Maotanchang, most of whom come from rural areas, the gaokao offers the promise of a life beyond the fields and the factories.

Yang Wei, then a senior at Maotanchang, had spent the previous three years, weekends included, stumbling to his first class at 6:20 in the morning and returning to his room only after the end of his last class at 10:50 at night. With the gaokao just 69 days away, Yang had entered the final, frenetic stretch.

"If you connected all of the practice tests I've taken over the past three years," he said, "they would wrap all the way around the world. "

Even with all the relentless practice, Yang's scores were slipping--a fact that worried his mother, who lived with her son near the school. The rent on their tiny room was high, rivaling rates in downtown Beijing, and it represented only part of the sacrifice Yang's parents made to help him become the first in his family to attend college. Yang's father is a peach farmer in a village 45 minutes away; his mother quit her garment-factory job to support Yang in his final year of cramming.

Yang's closest friend from his home village, Cao Yingsheng, was a classmate at Maotanchang. Cao's mother came to live with her son as well.

"It's a lot of pressure," said Cao. "My mother constantly reminds me that I have to study hard, because my father is out working construction far from home to pay my school fees. " (Even public schools in China charge fees, but Maotanchang's are higher than is typical.)

The boys knew that manual labor would be their fate too, if they failed to do well on the gaokao. Yang and Cao would have to join the ranks of China's 260 million migrant workers, who have left their homes in rural China in search of construction or factory jobs in the nation's booming coastal cities.

China's Economic Boom

China has come a long way since 1949, when Mao Zedong's Communist forces won a civil war over U.S.-backed Chiang Kai-shek and founded the People's Republic of China. Over the next three decades, the country endured great turmoil. By the time Mao died in 1976, China's economy was in ruins. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, introduced free-market reforms in 1978 that allowed private business and foreign investment--and led to three decades of explosive growth.

The results have been stunning. China is now the second-largest economy in the world, behind the U.S., and the ranks of China's middle class have swelled. Despite growing prosperity, vast swaths of the country remain rural and very poor, and the question is whether those people will be able to grab a piece of China's new wealth.

With so much at stake, it's easy to see why the gaokao, taken by more than 9 million students each year, is such a big deal to young people like Yang and Cao.

Despite its importance, the exam is coming under fire in China. Its critics say it stifles creativity and puts excessive pressure on students. Teenage suicide rates tend to rise as the gaokao nears. Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a classroom full of students all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying (see photo, p. 12).

The government is pushing reforms to reduce student workloads and allow universities to consider factors other than gaokao scores. But these efforts have met resistance from many parents, who fear that easing the pressure could hurt their children's exam results and jeopardize their futures. Many wealthy families are simply opting out of the system, placing their children in private international schools in China or sending them abroad for an education.

But for those of limited means...