When Guangdong’s first provincial vocational school opened in 1933, China’s vocational education system was barely a decade old. Guangdong Industry Polytechnic University traces its history to that school, making it the oldest vocational institution in the province and one of the oldest in the country, with 93 years of continuous teaching behind it.
The university has lived through every turn of China’s modern industrial history, from textile mills to artificial intelligence. Today its 13 professional clusters, four of them national-level, serve more than 26,000 full-time students across three campuses in Guangzhou and Foshan, covering some 168 hectares, with 18 undergraduate programs alongside 84 diploma programs.
Its teaching record includes 14 national teaching achievement awards and 22 national prizes in the student innovation competition, nine of them gold, and graduates’ first-job rate has stayed above 96 percent for five years. About 270,000 people have passed through the school since 1933, many of them the first skilled workers their families produced.
The faculty of 1,721 includes 1,364 full-time teachers, 738 of them dual-qualified and 507 with senior titles, and four hold State Council special allowances. Nineteen industry colleges built with partners including Huawei and Tencent keep the curriculum close to the shop floor, and four national collaborative innovation centers support applied research. Internationally the university runs overseas campuses in the Philippines and Malaysia, a workshop in Singapore, and a Belt and Road vocational education alliance that began in Guangdong and now spans 105 universities, associations and enterprises.
Few institutions anywhere can say they have taught vocational skills for 93 years without a break. The school that opened in 1933 has outlived the industries it first served, and it is now preparing students for industries that did not exist when its oldest teachers were students.
Data Source: GDIPU Official Website (as of 2026)
