Even for younger migrants with higher levels of education, the new skill landscape of the labour market was not always easy to navigate. 32-year-old Jian came to Shenzhen after high school and worked as a warehouse manager in a downstream supplier for larger manufacturers. His daily job involved matching the factory’s logistics demand with local capacities to deliver orders in time at lower costs. Over the years he had relied on an extensive network of local logistics companies and truck drivers that he carefully built and maintained. In 2016, upstream manufacturers began to adopt digital supply chain systems, which automated the matching process, rendering his network useless. As a result, his role was reduced to quality check and his wage had been frozen since then. He tried hard to turn himself into a warehouse logistics engineer but was constrained by his limited literacy and lack of resources and time. In early 2019, as his daughter started primary school, he decided to move to a Didi for its higher income:
it is more than learning to operate new machines. Digital systems change the logic of warehousing … requires systematic knowledge … not what a high school graduate can handle … I do not have time … I have to bring money home every month.
Apart from the HRSS bureau systems, the state also invested proactively in vocational education to resolve the skill gaps resulted from techdriven industrial upgrades. In this process, vocational schools received fundings to boost training capacity and forge partnerships with employers to secure employment opportunities. Students alike received tuition waivers and subsidies, sometimes regardless of their hukou status. Yet even vocational school education largely failed to prepare migrant workers for the new economy. Woronov (2016) found China’s vocational education is fraught with problems of obsolete materials, low social recognition and a mismatch between highly theoretical course design and purposes of practical skill training. Chan et al. (2016) revealed how schools colluded with governments to turn the supposedly skill-enhancing internships into a source of low-cost and flexible student labour for local enterprises. The experience of Guiwang, among other migrant vocational school graduates, echoed both observations. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from a vocational school in Jiangxi. Yet in the final year, he was sent to a local factory to tighten screws for internship. Feeling disillusioned, he escaped to Shenzhen. When he tried to find an engineering job there, he was rejected all the time, not only because such positions often require a bachelor’s degree, but because he is not familiar with the increasingly digitalized and automized systems. As Guiwang put it,
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Y. ZHOU