Education expansion in Shenzhen, China: Its interface with economic development

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone of China was set up as a development prototype in 1980. Soon afterwards, the lack of trained manpower emerged as a major obstacle to economic development. In response, planners favoured education as a means to facilitate development, with both formal and non-formal education systems soon expanding rapidly This article examines the strategies adopted for expanding education and explores observed problems in a case study of Shenzhen. On-the-job training has become an important source of human resource development. The dilemmas of general versus vocational/technical education and formal versus non-formal have been complicated by contradictions between the non-decentralised and decentralised aspects of educational administration as well as the State imperatives and local needs. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.