Nation promotes vocational education

Management talents and engineers may be in short supply, but what the Chinese business sector needs most is skilled workers and technicians.

As China's manufacturing industry has climbed up the value chain since the beginning of economic reforms 30 years ago, the demand for highly skilled blue-collar workers on the factory floor has been growing.

Despite that, factory owners traditionally pay blue-collar workers, even the highly skilled ones, disproportionately low salaries compared with those at the management level. Not enough workers are therefore willing to spend the time and the effort to acquire skills in their trade, leading to a shortage of technicians since the late 1990s.