AFTER bumping up and down along a winding trail for several hours in an August afternoon, 19-year-old Zheng Hanchao finally arrived at Maotanchang, a small town in the mid-west part of Anhui Province. Here, he will spend the next nine months for his second gaokao, or the national college entrance exam.

    What really surprised him, was that the place seemed to be a ghost town as the streets were empty and shops and restaurants were all closed.

    However, after several days, everything in the small town seemed to wake up again Aug. 29, the day on which the town’s cram schools started their new semester.

    “It’s unbelievable,” said Zheng. “The town is just like a cell phone which has the capability to switch modes: sound on or off.”

    For local residents, on the other hand, it’s become very common to see this kind of switch occur twice a year as cram schools make up the core of the entire town of Maotanchang.

    A magic school

    Maotanchang is a small town located in the southeastern part of Liu’an City. With its township area of only 3.5 square kilometers, the original population of the town is about 5,000.

    When school starts again every August, the resident number in the area surges to some 50,000, over 20,000 are middle school students; another 10,000 are accompanying parents from nearby towns and cities.

    Many of them have moved here from across the country and paid up to 48,000 yuan per semester (US$7,500) in order to get a place at the Maotanchang Middle School, an institute which boasts an unrivalled history in helping its students enter top universities.

    Maotanchang Middle School is a public school established in 1939. Today it has around 20,000 students spread over three grades. Around half of them are Senior 3 students who follow an excruciating school schedule for 12 months in preparation for their three-day university examination.

    According to People’s Daily Online, teenagers study as long as 16 hours a day continuously and without a single day off — and the school has called the extreme measures their secret weapon to success.

    Over the past decade, the enrollment rate at the school has been more than 80 percent each year. In 2015, more than 85 percent of the students participated in the National College Entrance Examinations from the school achieved the required grade to enter college.

    Thanks to the ultra-high enrollment rate, thousands of parents across the country are eager to send their teenagers, especially those who failed to obtain the necessary score during the previous year’s Gaokao session, to the small town.

    Apart from the ruthless school management, the students’ families do everything they can to increase the chance of success. Some of them have been passed down as tradition.

    One of them is the incense-burning ceremony. Weeks before the examination, parents would burn incenses under a “holy tree” outside Maotanchang Middle School to pray for good luck for their children.

    Another extraordinary sight is the annual send-off for the examination. Thousands of parents and residents swarm the gate of the Maotanchang Middle School waving at their children as big buses take these candidates to Liu’an city to sit through the life-changing exams.

    Economic engine

    In order to provide better services to all students and their parents, the town government has built a range of infrastructure in recent years, including a 3.5 kV transformer sub-station, a 3.4 hectares refuse landfill and a sewage treatment plant with a daily capacity of 5,000 tons. Furthermore, it has shut down all Internet bars, coffee shops or Karaoke rooms in the town, because the parents believe that those places of entertainment are detrimental to their children’s focus.

    “For us, the schools are not only the core of Maotanchang, but also the engine which can stimulate the local economy,” said Yang Huajun, office director of the local government.

    With more and more nonlocal parents moving to the small town, the hotel and real estate industries have undergone great development in recent years.

    The average annual rental rate has now gone up to more than 12,000 yuan, with the cheapest place going for some 4,000 yuan; the most expensive ones will cost you more than 20,000 yuan a year. As a result, to earn 200, 000 to 300, 000 yuan in a single year proves no difficulty for local residents, as long as they have some apartments to rent.

    Besides taking care of their children, many accompanying parents work in the town’s clothing shops and manufacturing factories, providing abundant human recourses for local companies.

    (SD-Agencies)