WorldSkills Closes in Shanghai as a Technical School Reveals 101 Graduates Now Work at Peking University
The 48th WorldSkills Competition ended in Shanghai on Saturday after a week in which young tradespeople from 68 countries competed in everything from tiling to drone operation — and a Henan technical school revealed that 101 of its electron-microscope graduates have been hired by Peking University.
The 48th WorldSkills Competition closed in Shanghai on Saturday, capping a week in which young tradespeople from 68 countries and regions competed on the banks of the Huangpu river in 64 contests — bricklaying, car repair, tiling and baking, but also beauty therapy, hairdressing, nail care and newly added high-tech events such as drone systems and smart security. The closing montage CCTV News posted, set to the promotional song sung by the actor Xiao Zhan, has been liked more than 32,000 times: hugs, cheers, tears, and a caption saluting everyone who "polished a craft day and night."
The Chinese delegation's 71 competitors came from 21 provinces with an average age of 21 — a generation of "post-00s" and "post-05s" that state media presented as proof of the proverb "three hundred and sixty trades, and every one produces its own champion." Among the faces that travelled furthest on social media: Yu Na of Beijing, calmly hand-stitching her way through the fashion technology event; and Tai Hsin-i, a 21-year-old from Hong Kong and the only woman in the wall-and-floor tiling contest, whose clean cutting, laying and grouting earned her a wave of praise — "beautiful and fierce," as one summary put it.
The softer moments travelled too. A contestant from Kyrgyzstan wrote greetings for Chinese visitors in Chinese characters, English and pinyin; when the Irish competitor Adam Long turned 25 mid-competition, contestants from other teams gathered unbidden to sign a birthday card presented by the judges' chief.
The week's subtext is the value of a trade. When the Skills Olympics opened in Shanghai, the story was master craftsmen commanding million-yuan salaries; as it closed, a Henan vocational school went viral with a statistic of its own: its electron-microscope technology program — reportedly the only one of its kind in China — has sent 101 graduates to work at Peking University, mostly as research assistants running the university's microscopes, and its students are typically booked by employers in their second year. On Zhihu, the discussion turned quickly to the inversion the numbers imply: applicants who missed the gaokao cut-off for China's top university can end up working inside it, because a scarce manual-technical skill is worth more there than another diploma. For a country where vocational tracks have long carried a stigma of failure, both stories made the same argument from opposite ends — the elite campus that hires tradespeople, and the international competition that treats a well-grouted tile as a medal event.