In China, the government has always attached importance to special education. A series of laws and regulations have been issued to ensure disabled people's right to receive education. Today, there are 1,655 schools of special education around the country, with 365,000 students; 1,029 vocational training institutes for disabled people, 2,898 ordinary vocational training and educational institutes that also admit people with disabilities; more than 1,700 rehabilitation training organizations for children with hearing impairments, which have trained and are training more than 70,000 children. In 2003, more than 3,000 students with disabilities entered general schools of higher learning.
The Law on Vocational Education was issued in 1996. Vocational education embraces higher vocational schools, medium technical schools, technical schools, vocational high schools, employment training centers and other adult technical training schools and social training institutes. To make vocational education more in line with the demands of readjustment of economic structure and urbanization, in recent years the government has readjusted, reformed and developed vocational education in the orientation of employment, focusing on construction of two major vocational education projects - cultivating skilled workers urgently needed in modern manufacture and services, and training rural laborers who are moving into cities and towns — to meet the sharply increasing demand of the society for high-quality, skilled workers. To accelerate the development of vocational education in western areas, the state has built 186 vocational education centers in impoverished counties in western areas with the government bond.
