China grapples with huge shortage of Blue-Collar Workers to run industries

Even as China’s prowess in critical technologies is acknowledged widely in the world, the country is  overwhelmingly lacking in skilled manpower who could plug a gaping hole in its industrial sector, struggling to find pace with the demand of time.

By 2025, China is going to face a shortage of 30 million skilled workers in the manufacturing sector, the country’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security recently warned. With China’s vocational educational system continuing to remain far from getting social respect, specialised teachers and encouragement from the corporate sector, the country is staring at a huge shortage of skilled workers in the manufacturing sector.

In its report in 2022, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security identified 100 sectors that face the most severe labour shortages in China. Of them, 41 were in the manufacturing sector, China Daily said.

Worried about yawning gap between demand and supply of skilled manpower in the industrial sector amid a rapidly aging population in the country, the People’s Daily, a flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China, in its editorial in the first week of May, 2023 said improving the population’s skills would provide a solid foundation for “building a modern socialist country comprehensively and rejuvenating it. It would also be critical for advancing future economic growth.”

But among China’s millennials, there is no craze for vocational education as those coming out of vocational institutes are paid less and have no respect from friends and relatives. To encourage wider social acceptability of vocational education, the Chinese government in May 2022 brought a parity between vocational education and general education system by introducing a Vocational Education Law.

As per the law, vocational school graduates will enjoy equal education and career opportunities as general education graduates in the country. Yet a considerable gap remains at the income level. The average monthly income of fresh graduates with vocational education degrees in China in 2023 was 4,595 yuan (US$643), compared with 5,990 yuan for those with bachelor’s degrees, said a survey by Beijing-based consulting firm MyCos. In fact, in the country where society puts pressure on young people to find a good job, buy an apartment and get married, vocational education remains a distant option especially among urban youth.

In his paper on ‘The Challenges and Dilemmas of Vocational Education in China,’ ZijingGuo, a researcher at Modern Languages University of Southampton in the UK, links such attitude in the Chinese society with the Confucian tradition where emphasis is laid on mental work over physical work.

Majority of Chinese parents discourage their children from joining vocational institutes as they do not add to their social prestige, South China Morning Post said. As a result, China’s educational system produces more than 5 million graduates every year even as they struggle to find employment.

In some provinces, administrative officials’ apathy towards vocational training institutes interms of their funding on a regular basis and non-arrangement of specialised teachers are also proving as barriers in creating a large pool of skilled workforce in China. According to China Daily, quality and expertise aside, several vocational schools simply lack enough teachers due to low pay and low social status.

China has a plan to bring about reforms in the vocational education system with focus on building “skill-based society,” especially for strategic emerging industries such as information technology and smart manufacturing as well as service industries like elderly care and childcare.

In June last year, as many as eight ministries led by the National Development and Reform Commission issued an action plan on reforms in the vocational educational system. But more than seven months have passed, and the status of the said action plan on reforms in vocational education is yet to be known, the Hong Kong-based English daily newspaper said.

The key issue confronting Chinese authorities in strengthening vocational education in the country is not just non-availability of enough youth for teaching but also there is a huge dearth of teachers.

The Chinese government in early 2020 issued an order that vocational schools should recruit for their teaching faculty those who have spent a minimum three years in factories. However, institutes across the country are not able to find sufficient numbers of such experienced men or women who could agree to become vocational teachers. Last year, there were only 610,000 teachers, whereas the number of students were as many as around 16.7 million in vocational schools in China, said China Daily.