In China, the government has always attached importance to special education. A series of laws and regulations ensures disabled people's right to education. Besides schools for special education, any disabled children capable of adapting to regular study conditions can enroll at standard elementary and high schools.
Today, China has 1,540 schools for special education, with 375,000 students; more than 1,000 vocational training institutes for disabled people, nearly 3,000 standard vocational training and education institutes that also admit disabled people; more than 1,700 training organizations for rehabilitating hearing-impaired children, with over 100,000 trained and in-training children. In 2004, 4,112 disabled students entered ordinary schools of higher learning. Of disabled children receiving special education, 63.6 percent of total recruitment numbers and 66.2 percent of enrollment were in ordinary schools or special classes thereof.
The Law on Vocational Education was issued in 1996. Vocational education embraces higher vocational schools, secondary skill schools, vestibule schools, vocational high schools, job-finding centers and other adult skill and social training institutes. To enable vocational education to better accommodate the demands of economic re-structuring and urbanization, in recent years the government has remodeled vocational education, oriented towards obtaining employment, and focusing on two major vocational education projects to meet society's ever more acute demand for high quality, skilled workers. These are cultivating skilled workers urgently needed in modern manufacture and service industries; and training rural laborers moving to urban areas. To accelerate vocational education in western areas, the Central Government has used government bonds to build 186 vocational education centers in impoverished western area counties.
