"WE get all kinds - professors, peasants, businessmen, street peddlers, company executives - they all are clamouring to sign up with us," said Mr Kang Xiaodong, fingering his gold coloured tie pin as he reclined happily on a couch in his bustling little office in western Beijing.
Mr Kang is deputy head of the Zhongzhou school, a new and truly revolutionary establishment in the capital of communist China. It is an institution where those who want to play the stock market can learn how it is done.
Tens of thousands of people from every walk of life have been queueing up to enrol for evening classes. A buying frenzy is sweeping China. This is the Year of the Bull in the Chinese stock markets.
Last Tuesday, turnover on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, one of two in the country, surpassed that of Hong Kong for the first time, reaching a historic high of 21 billion yuan (over £1.5 billion).
For the middleaged Mr Kang, the world he once knew has been turned on its head. "I couldn't imagine this happening when I was growing up during the Cultural Revolution," he reflected with a cheerful smile. "The conditions only came about because of basic changes in the country's policy. Now many people want to invest."
Since February, the number of new small investors in Beijing has been increasing at the rate of 1,500 a day. Four thousand managed to enrol at the Zhongzhou Securities Training School in the Beijing university district, which is run by an affiliate of a subsidiary of the Central Finance Ministry.
Chinese people are good savers, and the stock market offers much higher profits than the banks. It also gives that extra edge of risk which appeals to the gambler in the Chinese soul. But most have little or no knowledge of how to invest, how to identify risks and how to analyse trends. Hence the fierce demand for night school places.
One of the most popular courses is "Investment Risk Control" where the advice teachers give to the students, who include former Red Guards turned professional investors, is the most fundamental admonition for gamblers everywhere: "Avoid emotional impulses." "The aim of the school is to teach pupils to use their own judgment," said school official, Ms Zhang Yanling, underlining the need to change the psychology of people brought up in a system where individual enterprise was discouraged.
The first Chinese stock market opened in Shanghai in the 1890s towards the end of the Qing Dynasty, but the players were mostly foreigners. The Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Chinese Merchant's Stock Exchange were closed in 1949 when the communists came to power.
It wasn't until 37 years later, after paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, launched China's open door policy, that the first experimental stock market in communist China was opened in Shenyang in the industrial north east. It was a modest affair, with the trading outlet no bigger than a cinema ticket booth. But it was a start. In 1990 a new stock exchange was opened in Shanghai, and in 1991 in Shenzhen, the city adjacent to Hong Kong.
None of their teachers have been abroad or have any first hand experience of how the capitalist world runs its stock exchanges or securities markets, Mr Kang said. However, they have all worked at least 2,000 hours as dealers in the Shanghai or Shenzhen stock markets. They instruct their students how to trade on a stock market "with Chinese characteristics", i.e. with a good measure of state control. In China, for example, a single investor or group cannot acquire a company or mount a takeover bid.
The communist authorities sanctioned investment schools partly as a matter of prudence if millions of naive investors lost all their money there could be social unrest. Indeed, a few months after the Zhongzhou school opened as the first registered small stockholders school in Beijing last year, the Chinese stock market plunged, and millions took a hit. In a short spell of frantic trading almost every share price in Shanghai and Shenzhen declined by 30 per cent.
Mr Kang claims that their most attentive students emerged relatively unscathed from that "black" December 9th. "All our teachers were able to make a correct computer analysis of the situation and advise the students to beware of the risks as the market overheated," he told me.
Yao Gang, in particular, benefited from his night classes. He was a keen young student who took a course and then got a job as a company investor in a securities firm in Hainan Province, the large island off China's southern tip, managing a portfolio worth 200 million yuan.
"Only Yao Gang saw the slump coming and he managed to persuade the general manager to take appropriate action to save their investments," said Mr Kang proudly. "He was so grateful to us for what we taught him that when he visited Beijing during the Spring Festival in February, Yao Gang not only came by to thank us - he took us out for a banquet of Beijing duck."