As Zou Hongwei stood in front of the Guangzhou Experimental Foreign Language School preparing to send his children to class, he could not help feeling perplexed.

Teachers from the school school had previously reassured Zou that it was one and the same with Overseas Primary School, a prominent provincial-level public school in Liwan District.

But as he stood in front of the building and watched students of both attending the same classes, he couldn't understand how that could be.

Zou told the EO that though the Foreign Language School was said to be private and founded by the trade union from the publiclyl-run Overseas Primary, it did not have its own facilities nor full-time faculty.

"Our school has no principal. Overseas Primary sends staff here to observe and instruct our teaching. Their principal is our board chairman, and our entire school board consists of their faculty," said one teacher from the Foreign Language School who wished to remain anonymous.

Zou, from Zhejiang province, had spent some ten years working in the Guangzhou aquaculture trade. He recently bought a home in the city, and planned to move his daughters over to attend school there as well. But after days of visiting different schools in Liwan district, he said he was still at a loss of what to do.

"Sha Mian Experimental, like the Foreign Language School, didn't have its own school buildings. First-graders there attended class in Sha Mian kindergarten; second-graders were sent to Sha Mian Primary. People say they are the same, with the only difference being that Sha Mian Primary was a public school, and Sha Mian Experimental a private one," said Zou.

But there were other differences. Such private schools embedded in prominent public ones charged staggeringly high tuition fees - the Foreign Language School charged 4,500 yuan per semester, excluding incidentals expenses, such as for meals. The Sha Mian Experimental School charged 7,200 yuan per semester, or 60,000 yuan for six years.

According to a former Guangzhou education official, these so-called private schools failed to meet the National Private Educational Promotion Law on the grounds that they lacked the "four independents" - an independent legal representative, independent accountants, independent teaching facilities.

Nonetheless, the ex-official said that since 2000, such private schools have mushroomed in Guangzhou.

They pointed out Juxian Experiment Middle School, attached to Guangzhou No. 4 Middle School, and the Experimental School attached to Guangzhou No. 1 Middle School, as examples of the new trend. Although these public schools were set up specficially for migrant worker families, they charged each student 5,000 yuan a year in tuition.

Many of the new private schools rose from the ashes of public schools that had been shut down.

"For example, the Experimental School attached to Guangzhou No. 1 Middle School has taken up the former No. 50 Middle School... The Juxian Experiment Middle School attached to Guangzhou No. 4 Middle School has taken up the former Pangqiunan Primary School," said the education official. In these cases, the private schools always shared the same leaderships with the public ones.

What made Guangzhou so fertile for the rise of these schools?

Before, Guangzhou public schools could only accept a certain number of students that did not pass their entrance exams. The proportion of those students to the whole student body could not exceed a ratio set by education officials.

Those students who were accepted in this way paid huge sums to the government for the right, anywhere from around 30,000 80,000 yuan. The government then returned around 50% of these fees to the school.

A former Guangzhou school principal told the EO that one the one hand, these high profit incentives had schools seeking to increase admission of such students. On the other, schools didn't want to publish their enrollment lists.

Schools thus seldom increased the proportion of special enrollment without authorization. Moreover, though the government returned a portion of the fees to the schools, those funds could not go towards faculty bonsues or benefits.

Against this backdrop, some prominent schools started to increase enrollment of such students by way of pilot programs. Because of the significant profits yielded from these programs, many schools simply extended them into privately-run, pilot or "experimental" schools.

In this way, prominent public schools could prevent themselves from appearing to have taken on too many special enrollment students, and simultaneously have full access to tuition funds that would have otherwise gone to the government.

During Guangdong's two top political conferences this year, Meng Hao, a member of the province's political advisory body, once again proposed cleaning up private schools that riddled its public school system. His proposal suggested that these phantom private schools take a stand - as either public or private.

In spite of these efforts, however, its been business as usual for these schools in Guangzhou. Some have even increased tuition fees to cash in on rising demand.

Both the Liwan District Education Bureau and the municipal Education Bureau declined interview requests.