This is a translation from Modern Express newspaper, published on February 25. The online version can be found here.

SHANGHAI - There were many cars waiting outside the Huadong (Dongguan, Guangdong Province) Senior High School gate over the last two days. Parents were waiting to take their kids back home, permanently.

Over a hundred students in grades one and two have been involved in basketball gambling. All of them have been expelled from school.

To everyone’s astonishment, three students were found to have used their mobile phones to gamble more than one million RMB on basketball games. They had no money to pay back the bookmakers, so stayed away from school in fear of getting caught.

Behind these three were hundreds of students who loved Yao Ming, China's basketball hero who plays in the NBA. They gambled through the bookmakers’ agents scattered inside the school.

A school security guard told the reporter: “From 7pm last night, there were about seven students taken away by their parents. They had to leave, and many more will leave in the next couple of days. Many parents are so angry; one father coundn’t even wait to close the door of his car to punish the kid. He kicked him! I can understand those parents though, having a kid like this, no one will not get angry. This school is a pravite school charging RMB 20,000 to 30,000 just for the registration fee. Combined with daily expenses, the total amount is really high. All the parents want is for their kids to study hard.”

According to parents waiting outside the school, over a hundred students have been asked to leave. “There are two classes of grade one students, resulting in about 40 students being sent back home. The total number of students in one class is about 50, so half of the class is leaving.”

The school had investigated gambling before and had sent students home. But this time, the amount gambled, more than one million yuan, made the school especially angry. “Those students lost over a million in gambling and couldn’t pay it back. They feared coming back to school in case the bookmakers all came there to ask for their money back. Parents couldn’t find their kids and contacted the school, and that's how this was all discovered," said another security guard.

A student told the reporter that another grade one student named Liu lost several hundred thousand yuan. "He kept putting more money in to win back the losses, but he kept losing.”