Chapter 4: Vocational Education
China’s vocational education was not a priority in much of the 1980s and 1990s as the government was preoccupied with the expansion of the nine-year compulsory education and reform of higher education. Into the 2000s, the situation began to change. The expansion of nine-year compulsory education has approached saturation point; the spectacular expansion of higher education since 1999 has slowed down from 2006. The Chinese government began to pay more attention to senior secondary education, which had been sandwiched between compulsory education and higher education for decades.