Vocational & Technical Education

The basic task for vocational and technical education is to cultivate talents of various levels, who are in urgent demand for the national economic development. To cater to the need of economic construction, early in the 1950s, China established and developed over 1,000 secondary vocational and technical schools. By 1965, students in secondary vocational schools, vocational high schools, and technical schools totaled 1.422 million, which laid the foundation for modern vocational technical education. After 1980, secondary vocational education developed rapidly, and the irrational structure of secondary education was gradually being adjusted. For three consecutive years since 1996, students in secondary schools reached over 10 million annually. According to statistics, in 1998, the advanced secondary vocational schools of various types in the country amounted to 17,106, with the students totaling 11.26 million.