China Power | Economy | East Asia

China’s High-Tech Ambitions Have a Blue-Collar Status Problem

Most Chinese still view vocational schools and skilled labor as low status and undesirable.

As China celebrated its dominance at the Asian Games that concluded days ago in Nagoya, Japan, its achievement at another global sporting festival in Shanghai has been largely overlooked. In the 2026 edition of WorldSkills, what the organizers call an Olympics for vocational skills, the Chinese team topped the medal table with 41 gold, 11 silver, and 4 bronze medals. In fact, the Chinese team has topped the medal table five straight times in the biennial competition, a phenomenon that has been attributed to the country’s unparalleled investments in providing systematic coaching and training for athletes in the same way it does for the regular Olympics.

Beyond simply winning medals, the Chinese authorities felt the need to drum up public interest in the competition. Local and national media, and even governments, covered WorldSkills extensively while it largely went unnoticed in other countries. Given that whatever prestige that China earns from WorldSkills is largely geared toward a domestic audience rather than an international one, it begs the question of why China would even bother with prompting something that leads to little gain in global stature. 

The answer to the question may be found in a February 2026 announcement from the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) suggesting vocational school reforms. The document criticized the current system’s lack of connection between education and employers, producing few skilled industrial workers essential for driving China’s next generation of high-tech manufacturing. 

China’s 2026-2030 Five-Year Plan emphasized that manufacturing remains central in ensuring the technological self-sufficiency underlying long-term economic growth and safeguarding national security. The MoE implied that the country’s vocational schools, without reforms, would be incapable of producing the human resources needed to achieve that goal.

But for vocational schools to urgently produce talent for high-tech manufacturing, they need more than just an appropriate curriculum. They also need the best raw talent that China has to offer. Here is where vocational schools fall short. 

China’s university enrollment increased from 1 million in 1999 to 9.6 million in 2020. The country’s brightest increasingly aspire to join the ranks of what used to be a tiny segment of the intellectual elite signaled by a university diploma. The expanding path toward college education has cemented a social hierarchy in which a bachelor’s degree followed by white-collar work is seen as more desirable than a vocational one followed by a career in manual labor, no matter how technically sophisticated. 

That norm of high-education aspirations is........

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