Industry-Education Integration in China’s Vocational Education: Historical Evolution, Institutional Supply and Practical Forms

Abstract

As the world’s largest manufacturing country with the world’s largest vocational education system, China has formed distinctive characteristics in industry-education integration through more than 70 years of exploration, making systematic research on this topic of great significance. From the perspective of historical institutionalism, this paper constructs a three-dimensional analytical framework of “history-institution-practice”. First, it sorts out the development trajectory of industry-education integration in China’s vocational education, which has gone through four stages: administrative embeddedness, market exploration, institutional standardization, and system deepening. Second, it systematically explains the institutional system of industry-education integration, which consists of hierarchical policy supply, cross-system collaborative governance, school-enterprise dual education, and supporting guarantee systems. Third, it analyzes three types of characteristic practical forms: municipal industry-education consortia, industry-level industry-education integration communities, and modern industry colleges. The study shows that China has built an industry-education integration development model with both international reference value and local characteristics, which embodies the governance features of multi-level governance, multi-stakeholder symbiosis, and localized innovation integration, and presents unique institutional advantages including intensive resource allocation and dynamic matching of supply and demand between industry and education. However, further improvements are still needed in terms of institutional effectiveness, collaboration depth, and innovation vitality in the future.