Part IV: Communist Education

Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems
Communist Schooling
Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies
The Economics of Education
Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union
The 'Unproductives' Labor of Soviet Teachers
China's Vocational and Technicial Training

Source: Excerpts from Harold Noah and
John Middleton, China's Vocational and
Technical Training. WPS 18.  Washington, D.C.:
The World Bank, 1988: 1, 49-54.  Reprinted
by permission of the World Bank.  

CHINA'S VOCATIONAL AND TECHNICAL TRAINING

China has embarked on a series of reforms designed to improve the efficiency of productive enterprises through the introduction of elements of a competitive market economy. Vocational and technical education and training (VTE) is to be expanded and improved to meet the skilled labor requirements of a changing economy.

The efficiency of the VTE system in meeting changing requirements for skilled labor depends in large part on effective planning and linkages with employment. This study analyzes VTE .planning and labor market linkages in the context of the economic reforms, and in comparison with the vocational education and training systems of other countries.

The discussion is constrained by several limits. First, the focus of the larger study of which this forms a part has been on training and education for employment in industry and the tertiary sector only, plus some training for self-employment. Hence training for agriculture and rural employment has not been addressed. As 61 percent of China's population lives in the rural areas of the country, the special focus of the larger study constitutes an important limitation.

Summary and Conclusions

The conclusions that follow draw primarily on the observations and data for two relatively well developed provinces, Liaoning and Hubei. They reflect what may be possible as Chinese VTE is developed, and should not be taken as necessarily representative of contemporary China as a whole.

1. The labor force in China is very weak in skilled personnel at all levels, and especially so for higher level technicians. Yet China is committed to an ambitious program of industrial and commercial expansion. There is therefore a very strong demand for skilled personnel at all levels, despite deficiencies which may exist in the completeness, relevance, or up-to-dateness of skills.

2. Demand for skilled labor is stimulated, too, by underpricing skilled labor. Wage differentials for higher level skills are relatively small, and an important check on managers' tendency to use skilled labor to excess is therefore absent. On the supply side, levels of training capacity are low, both quantitatively and qualitatively for a country with China's degree of industrialization. The result is a severe and persisting imbalance between the demand for and the supply of skilled labor.

3. A further result of the imbalance in the labor market for skills is that there is virtually universal placement of the graduates of pre-service vocational training and education (VTE) institutions. Graduates of Skilled Worker Schools (SWS) run by various enterprise and government units under the broad control of the Ministry of Labor and Personnel are guaranteed employment after graduation through job assignment. The same is true for Secondary Technical Schools (STS), overseen since 1986 by the State Education Commission but having traditionally strong links to the technical ministries and enterprises. Automatic job assignment is not available to the graduates of the Secondary Vocational schools (SVS), also run under the general aegis of the State Education Commission. However the SVS studied have evolved in a very few years varied and extensive institutional linkages with employers, with the result that more than 95 percent of the graduates are placed within the first year after graduation. There is evidence that a substantial number of VTE graduates, especially SVS graduates, do not find work in the speciality for which they have been trained, but work "outside their training." This should not be automatically regarded as evidence of the external inefficiency of the VTE system. It may be a sign that the VTE institutions are managing to equip some graduates with sufficient transferable skills to enable them to secure employment in more than a single, specialized line of work. More research on skills transferability in the Chinese context would be welcome.

4. The near certainty of securing a job (either via assignment or via training institution linkages to the labor market and the graduates' own search efforts) raises the demand for pre-service VTE places far beyond the present and prospective (until 1990) capacity of the VTE institutions to satisfy. As a consequence, all VTE institutions are able to select applicants for admission by competitive examination. Secondary Vocational Schools are able to set relatively high admission cut-off points in the common entrance examinations for secondary schools, though still not as high as the levels set by "key" general education schools.

5. The present policy of pushing toward a 50:50 general-to-vocational enrollment mix by 1990 means that general senior secondary places will increase only slowly (from 7.6 million in 1986 to 8.1 million in 1990), while vocational school places in Secondary Vocational Schools and Secondary Technical Schools will grow rapidly (from 4.4 million to 7.79 million). As the numbers graduating from junior secondary education will still be rising strongly, the academic level of students admitted to VTE is likely to be well maintained.

6. There is as yet no evidence that the introduction of contract (as against tenured) hiring of labor has reduced employers willingness to offer and finance training. All respondents, whether employers, trainers, government officials, or research personnel, were unanimous in believing that the economic reforms (including the introduction of contract hiring) would probably increase and certainly not decrease, enterprises' training effort. Three principal reasons for this counter-intuitive outcome were offered: increased competition among firms will stimulate attention to higher quality output, in turn requiring higher levels of skills; technological progress and diffusion will also mandate higher skill levels, and hence more training; and, last, the structure of the Chinese economy will change, with more weight in those sectors that require higher skill levels. Thus even if the current practice of life-time attachment of workers to a given employer weakens, the economic reforms will, it is claimed, produce other very strong effects which will overwhelm the prediction from partial equilibrium theory that employers will do less training.

7. There is as yet no evidence that the policy of "training before employment" has been in operation long enough to affect the need for in-service training of workers. In-service training has fallen short in quantity and quality in the past for two major reasons: political events, such as the Cultural Revolution; and low levels of funding which have restricted the training capability of firms. As the economic reforms progress, incentives to enterprises to offer training (in order to raise labor productivity and become competitive) may increase, and firms may be able to use enhanced managerial authority to increase the quantity and quality of training.

8. The formal planning system seeks to balance manpower supply and demand, and is complex, with many levels and units. While manpower forecasting and planning exercises can have some value as general indicative guides, they are of little use (and can be thoroughly damaging) for economic development if a government enforces them in a mechanistic and rigid manner. Indeed the incentive structures and modes of government control are changing so fundamentally in contemporary China that the authorities' ability accurately to forecast future skill needs, and to use the results as the basis for reliable planning of VTE must be seriously doubted. In general, the climate of economic reform poses a particular challenge for VTE planning and development, mandating the need for a system able to adapt in fundamental ways to changes in economic management,

9. There are some solid grounds for optimism in this respect. Planning for manpower match and even for some aspects of the financing of the VTE system in China is already quite decentralized, incremental, and based on a good deal of formal and informal consultation and consensus building. In the current circumstances, therefore, China's present mode of "bottom-up" manpower forecasting, with only the most general guidelines from Beijing as to how many and what types of skilled workers to train, is to be welcomed as being likely to contribute to successful economic outcomes. The process, while structurally appropriate, could be improved through better information at all levels. Data on employment outcomes would be especially useful in policy and planning decisions.

10. In addition, the curricula of the SVS have been able to provide skills relevant to the service sector and to self-employment. These schools are scheduled for large increases in enrollment. In combination with evolving linkages with employers and considerable school initiative in finding work for graduates, SVS have the potential for providing large-scale, flexible, and relatively low cost forms of skills training to support the government's goal of expanding service sector and self-employment.

ll. The present report has focused on the external efficiency of the VTE system in China. However, the internal efficiency of the system (that is, the effectiveness with which available resources are utilized) suffers from a number of weaknesses:

1. training units are often too small;

2. curricula are very narrowly specialized;

3. course lengths are unusually long for the material covered.

It is beyond the scope of the present report to suggest ways in which the internal efficiency of the VTE system might be improved, although such improvements will have important implications for external efficiency.

12. China is not alone among the major countries of the industrialized world in seeking to improve the VTE system. Knowledge of the past and present experiences of those other countries is likely to be useful to Chinese VTE personnel, even though foreign models and practices can rarely be adopted wholesale, but must be adapted carefully to the particular conditions of the "borrowing" country.

Comparative analysis tends to support the following conclusions:

1. China has placed secondary level VTE in closer association with employers and the work place than have most industrialized countries. In this sense, VTE in China is potentially quite advantaged. Indeed, many advanced industrialized nations (for example, Britain, France, and the United States) are currently trying to find ways to involve employers more closely with secondary education.¹ Everything should be done to preserve and strengthen China's already strong and close connection between employers and training, for it is one of the best assurances that training will be externally efficient. Moreover, reliance on enterprises to carry the costs of training can provide welcome incentives to operate training programs more efficiently than government-run school-based training. China no doubt has a long way to go in realizing this potential, but as economic reforms take hold in China and enterprise managers are empowered to retain larger shares of their profits, internal efficiency of the VTE programs within enterprises may be expected to improve.
   
   
2. However, relative to its level of industrialization, and compared to the historical experience of other countries when they were at China's current level of development, China appears to have made a less than adequate VTE effort. "The formal age-based system of vocational/technical education in China has not developed steadily since the 1950's and remains underdeveloped compared to that of other developing economies".² "Achieving the four modernizations will require a good stock of skilled manpower in Chinese manufacturing industries and other enterprises such as transportation, construction and mining. The existing stock is low...".³ Chinese party and government statements about recommended policy changes continue to stress the past neglect of investment in human resources, in particular neglect of VTE (see "Li Peng Addresses Vocational Education Forum", Xinhua text, reported in China: PRC National Affairs, July 10, 1986). But it will be important to translate into practice the announced targets for higher VTE funding levels, for otherwise it is unlikely that the full potential of China's close linkages between VTE and the employers can be realized.
   
   
3. China's current policies in VTE call for continuing to shift away from apprentice-type VTE toward in-school VTE. In this respect, also, China is following a path already taken by many other nations. The outstanding exceptions to this otherwise general movement are Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. In these three nations, apprenticeships are based on a tradition of close cooperation between the employers, trade unions, and educational authorities; a highly formalized set of regulations, spelling out the details of the apprenticeship contract, the nature of the experiences to be offered and the skills to be learned; and the maintenance of very substantial wage differentials between apprentice and skilled worker. Clearly Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have profited greatly from their apprenticeship arrangements: standards of craftsmanship are very high, and the management and organization of production tend to be in the hands of those who know intimately the problems and potentials of the technologies of their industry. China could profit from a careful examination of such apprenticeship arrangements, with a view to adapting to Chinese conditions important elements of the German system.
   
   
4. On the other hand, China might find elements to emulate in the Japanese approach, which may be summarized as being neither "training before employment", nor "training after employment", but rather as "education before employment-and-training". A movement along these lines would require China to pay substantially more attention to in-service VTE than is presently the case. However, the present policy of "training before employment" would appear to lead in the direction of greater emphasis on pre-service training. Although VTE in China has the potential to move in the Japanese direction, this would require deep changes in the way the work force is organized, changes in managers' attitudes to skills acquisition and the deployment of workers in production, as well as very substantial changes within Chinese industry with respect to job-rotation, career-long training, and systems of remuneration. Whether such deep changes are a practical possibility is an open question.
   
   
5. China's current aim of achieving a 50:50 balance of enrollments in secondary general and secondary vocational and technical education by 1990 is also broadly in line with trends to enhance the vocationally-relevant content of secondary education in many major educational systems around the world. Indeed, there are some striking parallels between China's initiatives with respect to the expansion of the network of Secondary Vocational Schools and, for example, Britain's Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI), In addition, in most of the countries of continental Western Europe, employers are demanding that the secondary school curriculum be made more relevant to the world of work and production.⁴ There is always a cautionary note to be sounded here: VTE at the secondary level should not be used a substitute for a solid general education for most young people. However, China will in all likelihood avoid this danger, at least in so far as the curriculum of the SVS are concerned, for these schools devote a very large fraction of total school time to general education subjects.
   
   
6. China continues to rely on manpower needs forecasting in planning VTE capacity. In recent years, this forecasting has become more "indicative" and less "imperative"; at the same time it has become more decentralized and incremental, more aggregated and less finely detailed. Comparative and historical experience of the developing nations has shown up the weaknesses of trying to base educational planning on anything other than the most generalized forecasts of skill needs. At the same time, comparison of labor- and skill-mixes in the developed industrialized nations have shown that there are often many different perfectly acceptable mixes of skilled and unskilled labor that can be adopted, given reasonable flexibility of wage rates and wage differentials. In particular, socialist countries probably need to guard more than capitalist ones against the danger of concentrating too much attention on the production of large numbers of skilled personnel, and too little attention on the efficient allocation in production of this expensively produced labor. Using manpower needs forecasting as the basis for educational planning encourages falling into this error, which becomes ever more serious as a nation moves to a more complex structure of economic life. Hence, China's current practice of decentralized, incremental and aggregated manpower forecasting and planning seems appropriate. Planning can, perhaps, be strengthened on the enterprise side by strengthening the capacity of management to plan for efficient labor allocation in the production process.

NOTES

The analysis reported was undertaken as part of a larger World Bank study of VTE in China, and was based on interviews with Chinese officials at various levels, a survey of schools in three provinces, observation of VTE institutions and enterprises in two of the three provinces, and review of relevant literature.

1. Harold J. Noah and Max A. Eckstein, International Study of Business/Industry Involvement with Education. New York, NY: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1986. [BACK]

2. Anne C. Orr and James A. Orr, "Economics of Worker Education and Training in China: Lesson from Japan." Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1985:1. [BACK]

3. World Bank, China: Socialist Economic Development. (1983). Vol. III. "The Social Sectors: Population, Health, Nutrition and Education":138. [BACK]

4. Noah and Eckstein, op. cit. [BACK]