Chinese Education and Society, vol. 46, no. 4, July–August 2013, pp. 3–11.

© 2013 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. Permissions: www.copyright.com

ISSN 1061–1932 (print)/ISSN 1944–9298 (online)
DOI: 10.2753/CED1061-1932460400

Lei Wang and Heidi Ross

Vocational Education (I):

Current Issues and Challenges
Guest Editors’ Introduction

After a rapid expansion of higher education since the late 1990s and the uni-
versalization of nine-year compulsory education, one of the most salient steps
taken by China’s educational policymakers has been to vigorously develop
vocational education, especially at the upper-secondary level. In the Outline
of the National Plan for Medium- and Long-Term Educational Reform and
Development (2010–2020), China’s blueprint for educational development,
the state has regarded vocational education as the major channel through
which to boost economic growth, mitigate structural conflicts between la-
bor supply and demand, promote employment, and address issues pertinent
to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. To encourage the development of
vocational education, the state has stipulated in the outline that the scale of
vocational education should be equal to that of general high school education.
In the meantime, rural vocational students are receiving educational subsidies,
and students from rural low-income households and students who major in
agriculture have had tuition waivers since 2009.
According to a report published by the Chinese Society of Vocational
and Technical Education, 22.05 million students enrolled in vocational
schools in 2011, and the number of students accounts for half of the total
student population in senior high school. Since 2007, the employment rate

Lei Wang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Leadership and

Policy Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. Heidi Ross is director of the East
Asian Studies Center and professor of educational leadership and policy studies at
Indiana University, Bloomington.

3
4 chinese education and society

of vocational school students has been above 95 percent, higher than that of
college graduates, which was 90.6 percent in 2011 (Report 2012). However,
the high employment rate has not significantly increased the attractiveness
of vocational education. Research has shown that vocational education still
suffers from low social recognition and is the last resort for students who fail
to matriculate into general high school to receive further education (Song,
Loyalka, and Wei, Article 3). At the same time, many scholars question the
development goals and models of current vocational education programs and
curricula (Shi, Article 1; Wang, Article 5).
To help readers understand the development of vocational education in the
twenty-first century, we have invited scholars from higher education institu-
tions and research centers, as well as practitioners at a rural vocational school,
to contribute to the first of two issues on the challenges of Chinese vocational
education. This first issue focuses on examining and analyzing current issues
and challenges emerging from the development of vocational education. The
second issue will focus on continuing policy debates and practical efforts to
solve the issues and challenges articulated in this issue.

Development of Vocational Education in the People’s Republic

of China

In a society that has been and still is heavily influenced by Confucianism and
its accompanying values of the power of the written word and knowledge
for individual and social uplift, cultivation, and advancement (Kipnis 2011;
Peterson 1998), modern vocational education did not formally appear in
China until the mid-nineteenth century. After China’s defeat in the Opium
Wars (1840–42 and 1856–60), a number of reformist imperial governors and
other high-ranking officials realized the importance of modern technology for
China’s revival, and they established several vocational schools, including the
famous Fuzhou Navy Academy. Vocational education continued to develop
during the Republican China period, particularly before the eruption of World
War II and the civil war between the nationalist and communist parties. For
example, a national Vocational Education Law was enacted in 1932, and the
number of students enrolled in vocational schools increased 40 percent in five
years (Sun and Du 2009).

Establishment and Abolishment of Vocational Education (1949–1976)

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, industrialization has

been one of China’s development goals and vocational education has often
been regarded as the means to serve that end.1 In the early years, vocational
 july–august 2013 5

education, like the rest of China’s educational system, was influenced by the
Soviet educational model. That model from middle school to college brought
to China highly specialized and narrowly defined institutions. Vocational edu-
cation, including a system of workers’ training schools (ji gong xue xiao) and
secondary specialized schools (zhongdeng zhuanye xuexiao), were established
to train middle-level factory workers and middle-level cadres with specialized
skills. Workers’ status was raised significantly by the communist party, as
workers and peasants were regarded as the essential forces for the founding
and construction of the socialist country and economy. By 1965, China had
a diversified system of secondary education in which 52 percent of students
at the upper secondary level enrolled in vocational schools (Tsang 2000).
During the volatile era of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), this diversi-
fied structure was criticized for promoting social differentiation and elitism,
and most vocational schools were closed down, consolidated, or turned into
factories. By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the ratio of general
senior high schools and secondary vocational and technical schools was 94.2
to 5.8 (Wu and Ye 2009).

Golden Age of Developing Vocational Education (1980s–1990s)

The first call for strengthening vocational and technical education during the
post-Mao reform era came from Deng Xiaoping. In 1978, at the National
Working Conference on Education, he stressed, in a theme not so different
from the 1950s, that education should meet the needs of national economic
development, and that it was necessary to increase the number of secondary
specialized schools and workers’ training schools.2 In order to jump-start a
rapid increase in the supply of vocational education, the state asked educa-
tional bureaus at each level to convert some nonkey general high schools into
vocational high schools where students could study both general academic
subjects and vocational subjects. As part of the reform to break the “iron
rice-bowl” employment system (i.e., jobs allocated by the state with lifelong
employment guaranteed), graduates were not assigned jobs by the state.3
However, vocational education students could further their education by tak-
ing the general college entrance examination. Also, if they applied for college
majors corresponding to their specialization, they would be given priority
over general high school applicants in the college admission process. To
further modernize its vocational education system, the state sent educational
delegations to visit Germany and other industrialized countries to learn about
advanced vocational education models and programs (Article 9, Thøgersen
1990; Wang and Jiang).
Meanwhile, studying in general high school was risky because only less
6 chinese education and society

than 35 percent of senior high school graduates nationwide were able to enter
into higher education institutions in the early 1990s. By 1998, vocational and
technical education nationwide enrolled more students at the upper-secondary
level than general education; about 53 percent of new high school freshmen
studied in vocational and technical schools.

Decline, Revival, and Fast Expansion (2003–Present)

The golden age of developing vocational schools soon ended when small and
medium-size state-owned enterprises were privatized and more and more of
their workers were laid off. In turn, vocational and technical schools found it
harder and harder to assign their graduates jobs. The final blow came when
the tertiary sector, identified as the means for stimulating domestic consump-
tion, began to expand dramatically beginning in 1999.4 In order to increase
the supply of higher education, some high-quality specialized secondary
schools and workers’ training schools were upgraded to polytechnic colleges.
At the same time, general high schools became favored by junior high school
graduates, and the number of students in general academic schools rapidly
surpassed the number in vocational schools, a surge that was evident just one
year after the college expansion.
The large supply of college graduates and the shortage of middle- and high-
level skilled jobs soon resulted in low employment rates among new college
graduates (Luo, Article 2). In contrast, manufacturers in China’s economic
powerhouse region—the east and coastal area—began to face shortages of
experienced skilled workers. News such as “100,000 Yuan per Year Cannot
Recruit Highly Experienced Skilled Workers” appeared frequently in news-
papers and on Web sites.5 At the same time, most migrant workers, mainly
from western and rural areas, seldom received any skill training could not
meet market needs.
The discrepancy between market demand and supply of qualified workers
has worried government officials. Vocational education, especially at the upper-
secondary level, is once again regarded by top officials as an essential strategy to
solve China’s rapidly changing workforce imbalances. On November 7, 2005, at
the National Vocational Education Working Conference, former Premier Wen
Jiabao called for China’s education system to “accelerate the development
of vocational education and improve the overall quality of human resource.”
Instead of building on already universalized nine-year compulsory educa-
tion and expanding access to college-preparatory high schools, which are in
seriously short supply in western and poor rural areas, China’s educational
policymakers decided to vigorously develop vocational education. Since 2006,
in order to attract rural junior high school and poor urban students to study
 july–august 2013 7

in vocational schools, the state has provided RMB1,500 subsidies per year
to support those students. Starting in 2009, tuition for all agriculture-related
majors has been free of charge. Most recently, the government has affirmed
in the Outline of the National Plan for Medium- and Long-Term Educational
Reform and Development (2010–2020) that, eventually, vocational education
will be totally free of charge.6 According to a report (2012) published by the
Chinese Society of Vocational and Technical Education, more than 6 million
students have graduated from vocational schools each year since 2009, a 24
percent increase from 2007.

Current Issues and Challenges

In the first article, preeminent scholar in vocational education Weiping Shi

sorts out and analyzes seven emerging issues that have affected the develop-
ment of vocational education. He indicates that vocational schools should
assume three major functions: employment, promotion, and service for
society. Aligning with the state’s ideology that vocational education should
prepare for students’ employment, he argues that the function of promoting
students to further education should not be neglected when higher education
has been fully developed. Shi maintains that the goal of vocational education
should focus on students’ development and calls for creating a series of policy
measures to guide students to value and choose vocational education, rather
than imposing a fixed ratio of general to vocational education across the na-
tion. Those measures include developing an authoritative national vocational
qualifications framework, allowing students flexible movement between
general and vocational high schools, and establishing an independent higher
vocational education entrance exam.
In the second article, Yan Luo examines the development of vocational
education from the perspective of new institutionalism. She argues that vo-
cational and technical education has been constructed entirely outside the
industrial and enterprise system so that, during a critical period in upgrading
China’s industrial workforce, the vocational education system has not been
able to play its proper role in social integration and political empowerment.
She points out that it is because of the lack of a strict institutional access
system and review of the qualification standards for accreditation that the
newly emerged vocational high schools were simply converted from less-
competitive high schools, without any significant structural change in teach-
ing personnel and facility. Further, when secondary specialized schools and
workers’ training schools were gradually stripped away from their mother
industries and companies, vocational high schools served the role of “bad
money driving away good money.” Although workers’ training schools have
8 chinese education and society

better quality in providing vocational training than vocational high schools,

they are not able to compete with the latter, because students of vocational
high schools receive academic certificates from the Ministry of Education,
and thus can matriculate into colleges through the national college entrance
examination. Finally, the most fundamental sign of systemic failure is that
vocational and technical colleges, as the highest stage of vocational education,
became a dependent part of the higher education system. As their evaluation
performance indicator system was completely aligned with that of general
higher education, their distinguishing features were eradicated. Luo concludes
that thirty years of restructuring have resulted in an organizational crisis and
institutional alienation.
By comparing 2,216 rural junior students’ educational intentions and actual
choices after completing junior high school, Yingquan Song, Prashant Loyalka,
and Jianguo Wei, the authors of our third article, point out that almost half of
surveyed students were unable to realize their intentions to enroll in academic
high school. Meanwhile, enrolling in vocational high school emerges as a
reluctant, wavering choice for students, as reflected in the lowest correlation
between a plan to enroll in vocational high school and an actual choice to do
so. Based on the survey analysis, the authors question the feasibility of the
Ministry of Education’s policy objective of 50 percent of high school students
enrolled in vocational education. The authors’ further analysis reveals that
family socioeconomic status significantly affects students’ enrollment in type
of senior high school. The higher the family income, the more likely the stu-
dent is to enroll in an academic high school, and enrollment in a vocational
high school is less likely. Also, the lower the father’s educational level, the
more likely there will be no plan to continue school after middle school. Song,
Loyalka, and Wei suggest that tuition relief measures that attract low-income
students to choose vocational education should be evaluated in terms of their
effect on and significance to social stratification, the intergenerational trans-
mission of educational opportunities, and social equity.
In the fourth article, Po Yang investigates financial needs and access to aid
among vocational high school students. Her study analyzes 586 students from
nine vocational high schools in three provinces of various economic levels: Gan-
su, Hunan, and Jiangsu. Yang found a substantial gap between the demand for
and the supply of government financial aid. Moreover, access to correct aid in-
formation is limited for female, low-income, and low-ability students. Although
getting correct aid information has no significant effect on noncompetitive aid
such as the National Grant, it may become important for getting competitive
grants such as scholarships or fellowships. Her research reveals that current
across-the-board subsidies for all students cannot adequately meet the needs of
low-income students, and a need-based aid system is recommended.
 july–august 2013 9

Using vocational schools in Dalian, an industrial city, as a case study, in

the fifth article, Dong Wang argues that vocational schools in reality imple-
ment an instrumentalist development model that envisions students as tools
for economic development, neglecting their long-term development needs. He
elaborates his argument from three perspectives. First, schools put a sole focus
on their graduates’ employment rate, ignoring their “employment content,”
which should not only consist of certain specialized knowledge and skills but
also of core competencies that would improve graduates’ abilities to adapt
to society, allowing room for the sustainable development of their careers.
Second, it is risky for secondary vocational schools to frequently establish
and adjust specialized training, because popular specializations chosen by
students when they enroll might not necessarily be so by the time they gradu-
ate. It is also questionable whether schools have enough qualified teachers to
teach new courses. Third, the management of secondary vocational schools
has been increasingly influenced by local governments’ strategic economic
development plans, which may exacerbate the effect of instrumentalism on
human resource development.
To enrich our understanding of vocational education “on the ground,” we
invited a principal and a first-level teacher7 of a rural vocational high school
in Shaanxi province, a relatively underdeveloped region in China’s northwest,
to share their views about the development of vocational education. Their
article indicates that although the central government has been vigorously
developing vocational education, vocational schools, particularly those in
poor rural regions, still lack systematic governmental support. In the sixth
article, Jiang Liu and Guofeng Chen call for government at all levels to help
raise public awareness of the importance of vocational education, increase
funding, reform the system of teacher recruitment, training, and management,
give schools more autonomy, and set up an effective evaluation system suit-
able for vocational schools.
In minority areas, where compulsory education has improved significantly,
vocational education has not received the same attention, as Minhui Qian,
the author of the seventh article, indicates. There is a widespread view that
school-based education does not provide people with the skills needed to
earn a living, and that even vocational education cannot provide the required
knowledge and skills. Qian calls for a multiple-channel and multiple-format
vocational education in a multicultural environment.
For many migrant children, studying at vocational schools is the only way,
up to now, to continue receiving formal education in their cities of residence
after graduating from junior high school. The decreased enrollment of urban
students and the central government’s strong policy on developing vocational
education are the two main reasons that vocational schools in many cities
10 chinese education and society

have opened their doors to migrant children. Presiding over a capital city that
has received a large number of migrants, the Beijing government has taken
cautious steps to provide further education to migrant children.8 In the eighth
article, based on a survey project conducted in 2007 including more than
1,000 migrant children who studied in local junior high schools, Dongping
Yang and Qi Wang find a strong demand among migrant children to continue
studying in Beijing, and most of them prefer short-term vocational training
programs. Recognizing the difficulty of breaking through the restrictions of
the household registration system and fully opening up high school education
in the near future, the authors suggest “an orderly expansion” of vocational
education resources to migrant children.
We conclude this issue with the Lei Wang’s interview with Dayuan Jiang, a
research fellow at the Ministry of Education’s Central Institute for Vocational
and Technical Education. In the interview, Jiang reviews how the reforma-
tion of Chinese vocational education since the early 1980s has drawn on the
experience and models of industrial countries, particularly Germany. Based
on China’s national conditions and the needs of its socialist market economy,
Jiang believes that China’s vocational education model is likely to be school-
centered and adjusted according to market demand. Jiang also expresses his
views on the pessimism of some scholars with regard to the future of Chinese
vocational education. He thinks that individual views and government require-
ments sometimes cannot be fully consistent. Therefore, for an individual’s
research to become national policy, it requires communication, understanding,
and validation by practice, to the extent possible.

Notes

1. As early as 1965, at the first meeting of the third People’s Congress, then-
premier Zhou Enlai in his government working report called for the Chinese people
to “construct China into a socialist power with modern agriculture, modern industry,
modern defense, and modern technology.”
2. Deng Xiaoping’s Talk at the National Working Conference on Education;
available at www.jyb.cn/info/jyzck/200602/t20060227_11491.html, accessed July
16, 2003.
3. For a detailed description of the major types of secondary vocational schools
in the 1980s, see Thøgersen (1990).
4. Ji Baocheng, then director of the Department of Development and Planning,
now president of Renmin University of China, recalled the policymaking process of
college expansion in 1999 when interviewed by China Education Daily; available at
http://news1.ruc.edu.cn/102382/60264.html, accessed July 26, 2013.
5. See the reports “100,000 Yuan Per Year Cannot Recruit an Ink Engineer” (in Chi-
nese); available at www.4oa.com/office/748/932/200712/139145.html; and “100,000
Yuan per Year Cannot Recruit a Digital Machine Technician” (in Chinese); available
 july–august 2013 11

at www.citt.org.cn/news.aspx?nid=0ae18f85-07f8-4bf4-b164-3151374d8062/, ac-
cessed August 21, 2013.
6. Since the fall of 2012, all rural vocational students, students with agriculture-
related majors, and students from urban low-income households are eligible for
tuition exemption; see http://news.hexun.com/2012-11-01/147479966.html, accessed
July 28, 2013.
7. The ranking of Chinese secondary school teachers can be divided into four levels,
including (in ascending order): third level, second level, first level, and high level.
8. Only in 2013 were migrant children who graduate from a local junior high school
allowed to apply for vocational schools in Beijing.

References

Kipnis, A.B. 2011. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling
in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peterson, G. 1998. The Power of Words, Literacy and Revolution in South China
(1949–1995). Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Report on Development and Employment of Chinese Secondary Vocational School
Students, 2012. Available at www.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/
moe/s5147/201302/148017.html, accessed July 25, 2013.
Sun, P., and C. Du. 2009. Zhongguo jiaoyu shi [History of Chinese Education].
Shanghai: East China Normal University Press.
Thøgersen, S. 1990. Secondary Education in China After Mao: Reform and Social
Conflict. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press.
Tsang, M.C. 2000. “Education and National Development in China Since 1949:
Oscillating Policies and Enduring Dilemmas.” In China Review, edited by C.-M.
Lau and J. Shen, 579–618. Hongkong: Chinese University of Hongkong Press.
Wu, X., and Y. Ye. 2009. Technical and Vocational Education in China. Hangzhou:
Zhejiang University Press.

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