Recent media reports indicate that China is facing a serious shortage of technical workers, especially those with high-level skills. As the manufacturing sector continues to grow at a dizzying rate, this is creating a bottleneck in the fast lane of economic development and is an even more pressing problem than power shortages.

Even in Shanghai, which boasts a strong manufacturing sector, senior-level technicians account for only 6.2 per cent of the entire technical workforce. (In developed countries, those holding senior titles make up nearly 40 per cent.) In fact, in China demand or technical workers is so great that many technical school students already have jobs lined up prior to graduation.

By contrast, it has become increasingly difficult for other college graduates to find jobs right out of school, and many remain unemployed for long periods. The absurdity of this co-existence of a widespread skilled-labour shortage and a major surplus of college grads is a truly thought-provoking phenomenon that should serve as a warning to us.

For a long time our society has held biased views towards industrial workers, whose work and living conditions are relatively poor. Naturally, most parents don't steer their children towards such careers and most students prefer managerial jobs in government or business to work in a factory. They therefore opt for higher rather than vocational education even on a secondary level.

Such a huge number of young people are pouring into universities that the schools cannot respond adequately to practical needs and requirements. This creates a disparity between university curricula and real-world demand, and a good many grads find they don't answer current societal needs when it comes to finding employment.

We can learn from the corresponding situation in other countries, such as Germany, where education is highly esteemed. On average, fewer than half of all German high school graduates go on to university each year. The rest receive a vocational education that prepares them for a specialized, high-paying profession that allows them to be respected and valued for who they are and what they do.

Some Chinese college graduates are responding to market demand by attending technical schools that offer more useful kinds of professional training. This favourable trend means that jobless grads are adjusting their skills to suit the job market. And, it helps alleviate the shortage of senior-level blue-collar workers.

However,the fact that college grads must undergo further training at tech schools in the first place illustrates that a problem exists with respect to educational planning and resource allocation. Higher education and professional-skills training should be on a par with one another, as it is in developed countries. There, it is certainly not the case that only students with poor academic records choose vocational-technical education. Rather, students choose a career path primarily on the basis of personal interests and abilities.

It goes without saying that strong economic development cannot be sustained in any imaginable way without an adequate contingent of well-trained technicians. If China is to become the world's manufacturing centre, it will have to recognize this.

Here, too much emphasis is placed on academic success, while vocational education and training are given short shrift. To solve the problems this has created we should be putting much more effort into following the German example, and into structuring college education programmes to include the practical training that would enable students to find post-graduate employment.

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