The Skills Olympics Open in Shanghai as Master Craftsmen Command Million-Yuan Salaries
The 48th WorldSkills Competition opens at Shanghai's National Exhibition and Convention Center with 1,385 competitors from 68 countries — and lands in the same week that master garment patternmakers in Hangzhou and Guangzhou were reported to be drawing salaries above one million yuan a year.
The 48th WorldSkills Competition — the biennial contest billed as the "skills Olympics" — opens on Tuesday evening at the National Exhibition and Convention Center in Shanghai, gathering 1,385 young competitors from 68 countries across 64 trades, from aircraft maintenance and mechatronics to pastry and floral design. China has entered 71 competitors covering every event on the programme. Malaysia's prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, heads the list of foreign leaders Beijing has announced for the competition and a concurrent global digital-trade expo; the Games run to September 27.
State broadcaster CCTV's preview set out the basics — what the competition tests, who may enter, what to watch — while The Paper's editorial asked the harder question behind the pageantry: how does a country actually turn young people into craftsmen? The official slogan answers optimistically: "Master Skills Change Your Future" (技能改变世界，技能照亮前程). The event's traction ran well past Weibo; it was the No. 4 item on Baidu's hot search board on Tuesday with 7.6 million points of heat.
The Games arrive at a charged moment for China's job market. On the same day's boards sat a second story: factories are bidding up the price of people who can make things. In June, Shanghai's human resources bureau added the garment patternmaker — the technician who turns a designer's sketch into the templates a factory can cut — to its list of urgently needed, high-skill talent, and Zhejiang and Hubei have done the same. The craft is composite and slow to learn: a patternmaker needs five to six years of training before working independently. In Hangzhou and Guangzhou, employers now advertise 15,000 to 30,000 yuan a month for experienced hands, and some senior patternmakers are being offered more than a million yuan a year.
To carry that message to the young, the organizers reached for the country's strongest amplifier: celebrity. The actor-singer Xiao Zhan, one of China's most-followed stars, is the competition's promotion ambassador, and state-media accounts announcing the opening ran his posters into their feeds. A post by the newspaper Liberation Daily declaring that Shanghai had entered "WorldSkills time" was reposted more than 86,000 times. At Tuesday's rehearsal, singer Huang Zihongfan — who performs the competition's theme song as a duet with Zhang Liangying — posted backstage photographs from a stage lit in blue and orange.
The week's two stories answer each other. A competition built to spotlight mastery is opening in the same month that one kind of mastery — of the garment-factory kind — started clearing a million yuan a year. Whether young Chinese take the hint, that five or six years of apprenticeship can now out-pay a fresh graduate's desk job, will be decided not at the exhibition center but in the hiring offices of Hangzhou and Guangzhou.