The final of the 2025 World Vocational College Skills Competition was held in north China's Tianjin Municipality on Friday.
Themed "Skilled Youth, Shining Future," the event brought together over 33,000 contestants from 76 countries across six continents. Six teams participated in the final of the competition, with the one from Jinhua University of Vocational Technology in east China's Zhejiang Province garnering the championship.
The most prominent highlight during the competition was that it allowed contestants to select their own projects based on real-world work scenarios to address practical issues encountered in daily production and life.
"Our project is designed to tackle industry bottlenecks, such as complex production processes and high costs of raw material procurement in the actual chemical production process. Only those who master operating skills, understand principles, and do well in innovation can truly become exceptional innovative talents in high-end chemical engineering," said Wei Biao, a contestant.
For the first time, the competition introduced divisions internationally, establishing four overseas competition zones respectively in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa and Europe.
"In light of the diverse industrial distributions of different countries and Chinese enterprises' cooperation on production capacity cooperation in the countries concerned, we will continue to pursue improvement for China's vocational education to go overseas and for Chinese enterprises to actively participate in global production capacity cooperation," said Peng Binbai, director of the Department of Vocational and Adult Education at the Chinese Ministry of Education.
Final of World Vocational College Skills Competition 2025 held in Tianjin
An exchange program between China and France has provided thousands of French students with the opportunity to attend Chinese universities over the past year, giving them a comprehensive and multidimensional view of the country through their studies.
In 2024, China proposed an initiative aimed at bringing the total number of French students in China to more than 10,000 and doubling the number of young Europeans on exchange programs to China within the next three years.
Then, in June of that year, the education ministries of China and France jointly launched the Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) program during the first China-France Education Development Forum held in Paris.
Among the students to take advantage of the program is Mathis Champaigne, a French master's exchange student from the Institute of Higher Electronic Education (ISEP) in Paris. Through YES, he arrived at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) this September for a five-month study program.
According to the student, the program offered a valuable opportunity to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) from renowned scholars.
"In this country, you are very advanced in this AI field and so you have a lot of researchers, a lot of universities, very involved in this AI research. So for me that was an opportunity to learn from a great professor in a great university," Champaigne said.
Currently, 29 French students from seven French universities are studying at HUST across various majors, for periods ranging from two weeks to a full academic year. For some, a short-term exchange can give way to deeper ambitions.
"I want to extend my semester and stay longer because I feel like here the campus is made for students to have good experience while studying," said another YES program participant of HUST, an undergraduate student from the University of Strasbourg.
Since the initiative was proposed over a year ago, more than 8,300 French students have come to China for exchanges and studies, helping to spur a broader trend across Europe, with about 32,000 students from across the continent having chosen to undertake exchange programs in China.
The program also partners with other Chinese institutions, including the East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), where exchange students have had similarly successful experiences.
"So, the YES program is a really good program to study abroad and you can choose many different topics and minors. I think that's the best way to see China," said Paul Ferrigno, another YES program participant of ECUST, a graduate student from Montpellier Higher College of Chemistry.
"And engineers in the future, they will have to see by themselves how this country is changing very quickly, how this country is very good in innovation, research, technology, and finally how China is addressing global warming and sustainable development," said Jacques Mercadier, French dean of the International Elite Engineering School of ECUST.
Exchange program fosters China-France partnership in talent cultivation
