From a rural boy born and bred in an impoverished town in Chongqing to a postgraduate medical student at the prestigious Peking University, Luo Dasheng best exemplifies how lives can be transformed through hard work at school.
Luo, 24, is in his second year of a three-year master's programme in public health administration.
'I was pretty much single-minded in trying to get there, through all my years in secondary school, and I was lucky that it paid off,' he said.
Luo's success story ought to be inspiring to other underprivileged children. Unfortunately, such achievements are far less common nowadays, research shows.
Concerns about reduced upward mobility have generated much public discussion in recent weeks, as the trend is widely seen as a broader indication of the further marginalisation of rural residents at the hands of urban elites - those with power, money and greater access to resources.
A sense of deprivation among the rural masses has led to a ubiquitously pessimistic view of schooling.
