Huadeng Danzeng and Wang Zhelun are as different as junior high school students can be on the mainland.
Huadeng speaks Tibetan, Wang Putonghua. Huadeng comes from a small tribe on Qinghai's steppe, Wang from the bustling downtown of Shijiazhuang, Hebei. Huadeng's parents ride horses, Wang's drive an Audi. Huadeng likes painting, Wang is writing a novel.
What they do have in common, though, is that they are fresh recruits of the Major League Baseball Development Centre in Wuxi, Jiangsu. All the boys here, aged 14 and 15, were chosen for their abilities to pitch a ball with explosive power, or hit the ball a long, long way.
'I want to get a ticket to the United States to play in the major leagues, to become a superstar,' Wang said. 'But if I fail, I will pass the ball to my son.'
Major League Baseball is the sport's top professional league in the United States, and the development centre, located at Dongbeitang Junior High School, is part of an effort to generate interest in the sport among the mainland's 1.3 billion citizens; help schools build baseball fields, obtain equipment and train coaches ... and create future superstars.
Elsewhere in Asia, like Japan and South Korea, Major League Baseball only needs to convince headmasters, parents and students that baseball is educational, healthy and fun. But on the mainland it must first deal with the Chinese government. And that may be a hard sell considering baseball was dropped as an Olympic sport after the 2008 Games in Beijing for being 'too American'.
Even so, there is reason for optimism. One survey by a Beijing-based market research firm last year showed that more than 20 per cent of the mainland's urban population aged 15 to 54 is interested in baseball, and another by TNS Sport Asia in 2008 said 16 per cent of the mainland was interested in the sport.