Zhabei Tourism Vocational School: in 1985, training staff for a batch of new hotels

Basic facts

This section is about a school that existed for only twenty years. It has no graduation photograph to leaf through, because it has already been merged into another school.

1985: Shanghai suddenly needed a great many people who could serve

To understand why this school appeared in 1985, one has to look at what had happened in Shanghai in the years before.

In 1979 the Shanghai Travel and Tourism College was founded — China's first higher institution for training senior tourism personnel. In the early 1980s Shanghai's hotels for foreign visitors opened one after another: Jinjiang, Huating, Donghu, Xinya... What did these hotels need? Front desk, housekeeping, restaurants, cooks, porters.

And Shanghai at that time had nowhere to train such people.

In 1985 Shanghai set up three tourism vocational schools in one go:

In the same year the municipal tourism bureau, together with the Jinjiang, Huating, Donghu and Xinya hotel groups, and with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, ran a "training course for senior hotel managers" (HMD).

Training general managers on one side, training waiting staff on the other — two lines started at the same time.

That was the real shape of tourism education in Shanghai in 1985: short of people, badly short, short from the top down to the bottom.

No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road, next to a hotel

The Zhabei Tourism Vocational School stood at No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road.

There is a detail in that address: the Beiguo Hotel was right next door.

A school teaching hotel service opening next to a hotel — whether that was coincidence or intent the material does not say. But from a teaching point of view it was a good position: pupils had to learn laying a table, receiving guests and carrying a tray, and next door stood a real hotel.

What the school taught can be seen from its later specialisms (these are the continuation after the merger into Shibei Vocational High School):

The first two were the old trade of a "tourism vocational school"; the last two grew once the times had changed.

This is where a vocational school is most honest: its list of specialisms is its city's list of staffing needs. In 1985 Shanghai wanted hotel waiting staff; in the 2000s Shanghai wanted metro station staff and animation draughtsmen. The school changed with demand; when it could no longer change, it closed.

Twenty years in the life of a vocational pupil

From 1985 to 2005 — those twenty years were the twenty in which the meaning of the word "vocational school" changed most.

In the 1980s getting into a tourism vocational school was a good thing: on graduating you could enter a hotel for foreign visitors, the pay was better than in an ordinary factory, and you saw foreigners. In those days "knowing English and being able to carry a tray" was a solid skill.

In the 1990s the expansion of higher education had not yet begun, and a vocational school was still a proper way out for many junior-middle graduates. But the tourism boom cooled, hotels were no longer so short of staff, and the school's pull began to fall.

In the 2000s ordinary high schools expanded, and parents were generally unwilling to send their children to a vocational school. The vocational school turned from "a good way out" into "where you went if you failed the exam".

In those twenty years, the same school, the same teachers, taught the same things — but the way society looked at it had completely changed.

This is a common experience of vocational education in China, and not Zhabei's alone.

2005: three schools into one

In 2005 Zhabei District carried out a merger of vocational schools:

The three merged to form Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School, formally unveiled on 1 September 2005.

The site did not stay at No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road but moved to No. 584 Baoshan Road.

That address, No. 584 Baoshan Road, carries great weight — it is the site of the Oriental Library (built 1924, holding more than 400,000 volumes, "the first library in Asia", destroyed in the fighting of 28 January 1932), and also the place where the general headquarters of the workers' pickets stood during the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers in 1927. In 2014 the municipal government put up a memorial stone in the school grounds.

So today's Shibei Vocational High School stands on two identities: a vocational school, and a municipal-level protected heritage site.

The Zhabei Tourism Vocational School did not disappear; it became a group of specialisms within Shibei Vocational High School — hotel operation, hairdressing and image, the things it had begun teaching in 1985, are still being taught.

What a school that existed for only twenty years left behind

This section is written because it is easily forgotten.

It produced no famous names, has no old school building, no alumni association. After it merged into another school in 2005, even its name stopped appearing on its own.

But the people it taught are still here.

Between 1985 and 2005 the pupils who came out of No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road are scattered through Shanghai's hotels, guest houses and restaurants — many of them may have spent their whole working lives in the trade.

The most solid achievement of a vocational school is not in the school-history room but behind the service counters of a city.

The meal you eat in a hotel, the check-in you are given, may have behind it someone who graduated from No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road in the 1990s.

That is the weight of such schools: it does not train an elite, it trains the people who keep a city running.

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, Zhabei District Children's Palace, Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station, The Commercial Press and the Oriental Library, Other Corners Worth a Walk

Sources: that in 1985 Shanghai set up three tourism vocational schools (the Shanghai Tourism Service Vocational School converted from Huangpu Middle School, the Caoyang Vocational Technical School, and the Zhabei Tourism Vocational School); that the Shanghai Travel and Tourism College was founded in 1979 as China's first higher institution for training senior specialised tourism personnel; and that in the same year the municipal tourism bureau, together with the Jinjiang, Huating, Donghu and Xinya hotel groups and with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, ran a training course for senior hotel managers (HMD), are based on Part Nine: Education and Research of the Shanghai Municipal Local Records Office (Grade B); that the address of the Shanghai Zhabei Tourism Vocational School was No. 482 Zhonghua Xin Road (beside the Beiguo Hotel) is based on institutional information pages such as City8 and the 114 directory (Grade C, used only to corroborate the address); that in 2005, approved by Document No. 11 (2005) of the former Zhabei District People's Government, the Shanghai Zhabei Vocational Technical School, the Shanghai Zhabei Industry and Commerce Vocational Technical School and the Shanghai Zhabei Tourism Vocational School were merged, that the Shanghai Zhabei Tourism Vocational School was renamed Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School and formally unveiled on 1 September 2005, and that the school covers 34 mu with a floor area of 19,084 square metres, are based on Report on the Work of the Committee for the Care of the Next Generation of Shanghai Shibei Vocational High School (2018, Grade B); that the site of Shibei Vocational High School at No. 584 Baoshan Road is the former site of the Oriental Library and the place where the general headquarters of the workers' pickets stood during the third armed uprising of Shanghai workers, and that on 4 April 2014 the municipal government erected a memorial stone in the school grounds, are based on reports by the Jing'an District People's Government and Shangguan News (2021, Grade B); the passage on the change in the public standing of vocational schools between 1985 and 2005 is the author's own synthesis, with no single source, and is marked Grade C. The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.