This book examines how China’s higher vocational education (HVE) has been developed as a means of skill formation from multiple perspectives including policy, history, culture, sociology, and comparative studies.

Through systematic analysis of relevant skill formation policies issued between 1980 and 2019, the book reveals domestic and global policy contexts, positive and negative policy effects, and theoretical and practical policy implications for China’s HVE based on multiple analytical frameworks including human capital, Confucianism, neoinstitutionalism, and UNESCO’s ISCED Level 5. It concludes that China’s HVE has been developed by mainly following the country’s distinctive political economy and history, but that it neglects the dominant local culture, which in turn has led to unsolved and newly emerged challenges impeding HVE’s high-quality development.

Demonstrating the key steps required to develop and improve vocational higher education to serve skill formation, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of vocational and technical education, comparative education, higher education, sociology of education, policy studies, and China studies.