Three years ago, Tongzhou, a suburb some 20km southeast of Beijing, was nothing but dirt piles, its sky tinged red from construction dust. Now 700,000 people, mostly middle class, live there in newly built condominiums along man-made canals lined with willow trees and pagodas. On the eastern edge of town, 36 boys, ages 12 to 19, occupy a small corner of a worn, leafy campus. The walls are peeling, and the bathrooms have no doors. The boys sleep on flat wooden boards, five or six to a room. There is no heating to fend off the bitter Beijing winters, no air conditioning for the sweltering summers. The food is bland, repetitive and - worst of all for these teenagers - mostly vegetarian.
Still, the students come. They come dreaming of better lives. They come to play basketball. The Beijing Weikang Basketball Emersion [sic] Training Center is one of a handful of specialized private high schools in the city that mix basketball training with traditional academic studies. It shares facilities with Shi Dai High School, a conglomerate of private and technical high schools, including a rival boys basketball school, Wang Fei Hoops. The Weikang boys train by themselves, go to class with the Wang Fei boys and eat with the regular students. Anyone who can pay the RMB23,000 (Dh 12,323) tuition can enrol, and students flock here from as far away as Xinjiang, China's westernmost province.
Schools like Weikang were designed to fill a gap in demand created by China's growing interest in basketball - the NBA estimates the number of Chinese basketball players and watchers to be around 300 million - and the decline in the 1990s of traditional, government-sponsored sport schools. These Soviet-style state athletic academies enrol children as young as five or six, and assign them to a sport based on their bone measurements. Long arms mean boxing, height means basketball. Students see their parents on weekends and holidays. Otherwise, they train everyday and study rarely.
Since opening the creaky doors of its socialised economy to the world, the central Chinese government has realised the need to transform its draconian sport machine into a capitalist system where corporate sponsorship pays and earns. Government sport schools are seen as dinosaurs in the landscape of China's new capitalism - the last bastions of a state planned economy. In 1998, the government voted to dismantle the old sport education apparatus. Private schools like Weikang began popping up, teaching team sports like basketball that the old system had historically failed to excel in.
But in 2001 Beijing won the hosting rights for the 2008 Olympics, and everything changed. All reform was put on hold and replaced by Project 119 (as in: 119 gold medals), a government-funded sport program based upon the old state system. Schools like Weikang hung on if they could. These days, the school's most important function is as a loophole through China's intensely competitive education system. Most universities drop their minimum entrance exam score by 40 per cent for a basketball player ranked high in his province. So, while basketball-loving students might see the schools as a step towards their dreams (fame, fortune, the Olympics, the NBA), their parents are more likely to see it as a leg up in the battle for university spots.
Liang Fei, 19, is Weikang's star player. At just over 2 metres, he is also the school's tallest student. The shy 11th grader is already being courted by Shanxi Zhongyu, a team in the Chinese Basketball Association. Off court, he slumps his shoulders and speaks softly when he speaks at all. When he came to the school almost three years ago, it wasn't to chase a dream but to find a livelihood. "He's from a very poor family in Anhui," says Liu Zhenyan, who owns and runs Weikang with her husband Yang Kairui. Fei's father is unemployed. His mother, a nanny in Guangzhou, makes barely enough money to pay Liang's tuition. He has already dropped out twice because of his family's financial hardships, making him two years older than his classmates.
When a former classmate recommended Weikang to Fei three years ago, he hopped on the train to Beijing because, as he puts it, "there was nothing for me to do at home". He had never played basketball before. "The coach said the less I knew the better," he says. "So they can teach me from scratch." When he arrived in Beijing, he dribbled a ball a few times up and down the court. The school gave him a scholarship covering his tuition, board and meals. "His height was obvious so we thought he had the potential," says Liu. "In a school like this, you need a few talented players to carry the team. Plus with his family situation we thought he would be able to take the hardships of training." His family has never seen him play.
The boys' schedule is strictly regimented. A wake-up call sounds at 6:30am, and breakfast is at 6:40am. They study for half an hour, then train until 9:30. After two hours of class, they get two hours of free time to eat at the cafeteria and steal a quick nap. Then there's class until 5pm, then dinner, then an hour of study, then training until 9 and free time until lights out at 10. Students from Beijing are allowed to go home over weekends. Everyone else stays on campus and trains for another three hours on Saturday.
Liu and Yang founded Weikang in 2001. Yang, a former building manager and amateur basketball player, had no experience in education, but saw a demand and an opportunity. The couple invested their savings in advertisements for a basketball summer camp, then kept as many students as they could when the school year started. Yang also hired Ma Jian, the first Chinese basketball player to play university basketball in America, to be the famous face of a business trying to mask its struggles.
According to Liu, the school has neither grown nor become profitable since its conception. Yang insists that "if [students] have the hope, they'll come". Liu is sceptical. "RMB 30,000 a year is too much for most people," she says. She shakes her head with exasperation. "Why do we keep going? Because he's obsessed." At the morning flag-raising ceremony before breakfast the boys - bored and sleepy - sway like reeds in the wind. But they come alive at practice. The gym is hot, and its once-white walls are yellowed and peeling. The hoops have no nets. The boys are skinny: running drills up and down the half court, jumping and twisting their bodies for layups, they look like paper dolls.
Liang's shyness disappears on the court. He wins nearly every tip-off, dunks with ease and smacks the ball out of other players' hands with relish. "He's their leader," says Abudacar Fofana, the school's coach. "When he talks, they listen." Liang is joined on the starting line-up by his classmate Aili Duosi, a polite 17 year-old Uyghur from Telamayi, a small town of about 100,000 in Xinjiang province. He vividly remembers watching his first NBA game two years ago. "Rockets vs. Spurs", he says, referencing two American basketball teams. "I never liked basketball before, but I saw Yao Ming and got so excited and wanted him to do well. I watched and wanted to handle the ball just like them."
When Duosi's grades started to decline in junior high, he joined the school basketball team and entered a basketball competition that awarded its winner a place at the local high school without an entrance exam. Duosi won and enrolled at the local high school, but his thoughts quickly turned to basketball. He begged his parents, who own a business exporting Xinjiang food specialities like cakes and raisins, to let him attend Weikang, which he had researched on the internet. They eventually relented.
His first few months in Beijing were hard. The Uyghurs are a Muslim Turkic people who speak a Turkic language. Their region is more culturally related to central Asia than to Beijing. In the capital city, people openly stared at Duosi's big, light brown eyes, high cheek bones and fuzzy, light brown hair. At first, he could not eat the cafeteria food because it was cooked with the occasional smidgen of pork. He missed speaking Uyghur so much that he talked to himself.
On top of these practical difficulties was the difficult fact that, in Beijing, Duosi's skills were not nearly as noteworthy as they had been in Xinjiang. "I thought I was good. But when I got here, everyone was so much better," he says, his Mandarin tinged with a slight accent. "I used to have my own dreams. I thought I was going to play in the NBA. It's not realistic. There are so many Americans as tall as me, faster than me, better than me."
Duosi has adapted well to the loss of his international basketball dream. He and his four roommates, including Liang Fei, lie awake at night, muscles aching, and chat about their hopes for the future. Duosi hopes to use his basketball skills to earn a spot at a good university. He also plans to continue modelling, a side career he stumbled into when a talent scout plucked him out of practice one day and plopped him in a music video.
Not everyone acclimates so well. Zhang Yan, a tall, slightly chubby 17 year-old with glasses, arrived at Weikang a year and a half ago. Like Liang, he came out of desperation. Unlike Liang, he has no future in basketball. "I hate this place," Zhang says. "There's no room to breathe here." Zhang hails from the west side of Beijing. He has two white collar parents, an entrepreneurial spirit and an intense hatred for academics. Last November, he borrowed RMB50,000 from his mother, opened a clothing store in Beijing and made the money back in six months. Now a friend works the store for him, and he drops in on weekends. But in China's middle class society, a 17-year old academic underachiever is perceived as having no future, no matter how many stores he manages.
"My grades were bad. I didn't even take the zhongkao," Zhang says, referring to the high school entrance exam. "Nowhere else would take me. I don't even like basketball. My dad was an athlete so he kept pushing me to be one too." Academics are no one's strong suit at Weikang. Students openly read magazines in class. Zhang hides behind his gym bag and sleeps. During study hall, the boys spend as much time rushing to the windows to stare at girls as they do pretending to study at their desks.
"They're very tired, usually," explains Li Hanbing, their maths teacher. Nian Cunhui, a supervisor at the school, is more blunt. "They're not good at math and English, the harder subjects," he observes. "People's concentrations have a limit." At mealtimes, eating is a fast, shovelling action. Pauses and talking are minimal. Many forsake chopsticks for spoons, and those who don't spend most of their time with their mouths hovering close by the edge of a tray piled high and wide with white rice, steamed bread and vegetables.
"We're practically forced to be monks here," grumbles Duosi, who says that he is rarely able to eat until he is full. The boys' living quarters are spartan but neat and smell of sweat and instant noodle seasoning. There is an air conditioner in the corner that is never plugged in - "you know," the boys say, shrugging, "for show". They wash their laundry by hand. Sometimes during lunch breaks they flirt with girls in the leafy courtyard.
One day in late spring, a dozen of the boys squeeze together in one of their dormitory rooms. Their bright Nikes are lined up in a row on the floor, and their greying white socks are draped over the radiator that never works. One of them is describing the exhibition game in Shanxi province where Liang Fei was scouted by the Zhongyu. "I swear to you, these guys were big," he says. "They were as tall as Liang Fei, their waist were huge, like this kid here." He puts his hands around the waist of a chubbier boy, who frowns. "Their thighs are as thick as your head! What would I be lying to you for?
"Everyone had facial hair!" Everyone leans forward from their bunk bed perches. They sit so close together that their arms intertwine. "Oh man, can you imagine if Da Ge goes pro?" someone wonders, using the respectful term for an older brother. "Yeah," says another. "It'll be Liang Fei this and Liang Fei that. Coach Yang can take down Ma Jian's name as a billboard." Everyone responds at once: "Wow."
Xiyun Yang is a freelance writer in Beijing. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post and the South China Morning Post.
