Journalist |
Editor | Wen Shuqi
Gree is now growing its own next-generation factory workers.
On the evening of August 17, Gree Electric’s Zhuhai Gree Technical School dropped its first enrollment announcement—the school plans to take in 300 junior high graduates aged 15 to 18, with a 3-year program and tuition running between 9,000 and 15,000 yuan a year.Dong Mingzhu herself is at the helm as principal.
Among the first batch of 9 majors, you’ll find refrigeration equipment repair, mold making, smart equipment operations and maintenance, mechatronics, electrical automation installation and repair, and testing tech for electromechanical products — basically a mirror image of a manufacturing plant’s entire production chain. Add in IoT applications, multimedia production, and computer applications and repair, and the lineup also covers the digital skills manufacturers desperately need for their transformations.
Gree’s training philosophy for this school is refreshingly direct — “Walk in as a student, walk out as an employee; graduate and you’re job-ready.” From day one, students get exposed to real corporate resources. The teaching team mixes Gree’s veteran engineers, senior technicians, and full-time school instructors, with lessons built around a simple mantra: classrooms mirror workshops, and student projects mirror actual products. Graduates get first dibs on internships and jobs at Gree Electric and its supply chain partners.
For Gree, this is basically a talent supply chain that’s been moved to the very front of the line.
Dong Mingzhu’s Other “Production Line”
For decades, the factory floor has been Dong Mingzhu’s second home.
She’s spent years talking up manufacturing, tech, and the spirit of craftsmanship. Now, she’s pushing that logic one step further: instead of just making products, she’s making the people who make the products.
What really stands out here is that Gree isn’t starting with universities or industry colleges. It’s going straight to junior high graduates. That means the company is stepping into talent cultivation way earlier than anyone else in the game.
Traditionally, hiring happens after graduation, and companies then have to train newbies to become truly job-ready. Gree is flipping that script — shifting from “hire after graduation” to “train from enrollment.”
This shift tracks with how the manufacturing workforce is changing. Today’s factory isn’t just assembly lines and single-skill jobs anymore. With smart manufacturing, new energy, and industrial internet taking off, companies need people who can juggle mechanics, electronics, automation, and even digital tech all at once.
The major lineup Gree has put together is a dead giveaway of that transformation. Refrigeration, molds, mechatronics, and electrical automation are still the bread and butter, but smart equipment, IoT, and computer science are all baked into the same talent-development framework.
What companies need now isn’t a worker who knows one thing — it’s a multi-skilled pro who understands equipment, technology, and the whole production flow.
And that’s exactly where companies have the edge in vocational education.
Companies live and breathe the job. They see production and tech shifts every single day. They know which roles are short-staffed and exactly what skills a new hire lacks when they first hit the line. When schools bring those real-world needs into their curriculum and course design early on, the gap between “what industry wants” and “what students learn” shrinks dramatically.
This is what people in vocational ed have been pushing for years as industry-education integration. Gree is putting its engineers and senior techs in the classroom, turning production equipment into training tools, and using real products as teaching case studies. In essence, it’s trying to make the distance between school and factory as short as possible.
And having Dong Mingzhu personally sign on as principal makes this whole enterprise-school experiment impossible to ignore.Butwhether this school will actually produce the talent Gree needs at scale is still an open question. With just 300 students in the first cohort, this feels more like a controlled experiment than a full-blown strategy.
Companies Aren’t Just Hiring Anymore — They’re Building People
Gree is hardly the first company to open a school.
In manufacturing, XCMG has been at it for over 30 years. Its Xuzhou Construction Machinery Technician College has been churning out skilled workers for the industry, graduating more than 14,000 technicians since its founding — tons of them now working at XCMG or local firms. The school has even produced national-level technical masters and chief technicians. For XCMG, the school is simply part of its talent infrastructure.
What Gree is doing follows a similar playbook: a company directly running a technical school, pushing its job requirements, production scenarios, and technical standards all the way down to the talent-development stage.
But enterprise-run education doesn’t stop at trade schools.
Geely Group founded Beijing Geely College back in 2000, which later grew into Beijing Geely University, upgraded to a four-year undergraduate institution in 2014, and relocated to Chengdu in 2020 to become Geely University. That move stretched corporate education from “skills training” all the way to “applied undergraduate degrees,” extending the education-industry link from just landing jobs to shaping entire academic programs and hands-on teaching.
Huawei took a different route.
Instead of simply copying the “build your own school” model, Huawei plugged its technical standards and industry needs into universities through ICT academies, industry partnerships, joint colleges, and certification systems. Corporate participation in education, in this case, expanded from running schools to co-designing courses, training faculty, and setting talent standards.
And then there are the tycoons pushing it even further — like Cao Dewang and Yu Renrong.
Cao Dewang founded Fuyao University of Science and Technology, which welcomed its first undergraduate class in 2025. Positioned as a new research university, its inaugural majors span computer science, smart manufacturing, vehicle engineering, and materials. Yu Renrong, meanwhile, is behind Eastern Institute of Technology, another high-caliber, small-scale, innovation-driven research university.
Neither of these schools is framed as a corporate training ground. They’re trying to channel entrepreneurial industry experience, capital, and resources into higher education and research.
Different paths, but the underlying logic is the same: companies are no longer content to sit around waiting for schools to hand them ready-made graduates. They’re jumping into the talent-development game themselves.
That’s the biggest difference between enterprise-run schools and the old-school university-company partnerships. In the past, companies were mostly internship hosts or hiring destinations. Now, some are stepping up to shape curriculums, design courses, train teachers, and even own the schools outright.
Policy has been clearing the runway for this too.
Back in October 2021, the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council issued guidelines on advancing high-quality vocational education, explicitly encouraging listed companies and industry leaders to run vocational schools and urging all types of enterprises to participate in vocational education within the law. The same document pushed for co-building industry colleges and corporate academies, with leading firms deeply involved in program planning, curriculum development, textbook creation, and teaching delivery.
The revised Regulations on the Implementation of the Private Education Promotion Law, effective September 1 of that year, also made it clear that the state encourages donations and foundations to support private schools, and welcomes companies to establish or co-run vocational private schools through sole ownership, joint ventures, or partnerships.
Beyond policy, the real push comes from industry itself.
Companies know exactly what skills their jobs demand — far better than most schools do. They’ve got real production environments, actual equipment, and working engineers. Bring those assets into the classroom early, and you cut down the distance between textbook theory and shop-floor reality.
For the companies, it’s also about pulling the talent supply chain forward. It used to be “school trains → company hires → company retrains.” Now it’s “company co-trains → early screening → graduate employed.” The training cycle gets longer, but hiring costs and ramp-up time for new employees have a real shot at coming down.
But the value of enterprise-run schools shouldn’t be measured solely by “churning out employees for the parent company.”
Xiong Bingqi, head of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told NUPIAO: “As public education keeps expanding, the supplementary role of private education is fading. Against that backdrop, the most valuable thing private schools can do is explore personalized, diversified education models that compete with public schools — that competition raises the overall quality of education and gives students genuinely different choices.”
When people talk about private education, the conversation usually circles around scale, enrollment numbers, and market share. But when companies step into education, the really interesting question is whether they can bring something genuinely new to the table.
Gree’s edge is manufacturing. XCMG’s is the construction machinery supply chain. Geely’s is the auto industry. Huawei’s is digital tech. Cao Dewang and Yu Renrong are trying to convert entrepreneurial know-how and capital into university-level research. These are assets traditional schools simply can’t conjure up on their own.
But corporate education has its limits, too. A company knows its own job requirements better than anyone — but that doesn’t mean it understands the science of education. A business can pivot its headcount overnight in response to market shifts, but it can’t rewire a student’s three-, four-, or even longer-year training cycle at the same speed. A company can produce someone perfectly matched to its own production system, but students have to live through a much longer career than any single company’s current needs.
So the biggest trap for enterprise-run schools is turning into nothing more than an extension of the company’s recruiting pipeline.
For a business, “graduate and you’re hired” is efficiency. For education, though, what matters just as much is whether a graduate can keep learning, switch roles, move to another company, and ride out industry shifts. That’s the real question Gree will have to answer in the years ahead.
