When complete, it will provide electricity to an enormous area and umpteen million people, and will flood the Three Gorges. To say that the gorges are spectacular is to say that Bill Gates is not short of a bob or two, or that Picasso dabbled his brush occasionally.

The gorges are sensational: deep gashes in sheer limestone cliffs, where the river has been gouging and scoring for millennia.

Aware of the tourist potential of this extraordinary, now vanishing, phenomenon, the Chinese have cranked up the number of holiday packages which include a three-day steamer trip through the gorges. Every glossy British Sunday paper supplement beseeches the discerning traveller to go while they are still there.

Not far from the swelling dam is a vocational high school, what we in the UK would call a college. Owned by the main contractor for the whole dam project, it provides training for many of those who either now or in the future will have jobs which have spun out of the dam. It is here that the civil engineers learn their stuff, here that the electrical engineers get up to speed, and here, too, that future tour guides practise their smiles, their group-control and their English.

Private education it is not, although the students do pay fees. Industry-controlled education it definitely is, and students receive certificates of achievement from the company rather than from the education authority. Some of the examinations, but not all, which students take are also approved by the provincial education committee, which then issues a second certificate. How long will it be before the UK government’s wish to bring further education into a closer clinch with industry produces a company-owned college? Sign here for the National Lottery experience, enrol on-line at the Virgin Academy, get certificated by British Nuclear Fuels.

There was some very impressive evidence of excellence in the Chinese school. Apart from the familiarly lavish and expertly presented hospitality, so abundant that you would be forgiven for thinking that the three gorges were breakfast, lunch and dinner, there were banks of top-of-the-range computers. Some of the very fancy electrical engineering kit would have made departments back home wince with envy. The Chinese were very keen to know whether what was on offer in the college was up to British standards. At a time when the standards of British further education colleges have been slagged off by those who are paid to know better, it was good to know that in China, at least, our colleges are reckoned to be world leaders.

China has always been proud of its unmatched record as a country of innovation (where, among other things, paper, ink and compasses were invented), but at the same time aware of its need not to ignore lessons it can learn from the rest of the world. As they contemplate entry into the World Trade Organisation, the Chinese want to be sure that the skills of their people are good enough to cope with increased global competition. Aligning their vocational standards with the best of the West is seen as a key objective.

If you could mix Chinese traditions of unflinching study, no doubt stiffened by the month-long programme of compulsory military drill which kicks off every student’s university experience, with the British willingness to embrace new curriculum, you would be on to something. Matching the old ways with fresh ideas has been elevated to an art form. Even traditional Chinese medicine has moved on. At the first sign of a sniffle, a Chinese sufferer reaches not for a packet of paper hankies or an aspirin but for a mug of hot Coca Cola infused with shavings of ginseng.

Competence-based assessment, student-centred learning and on-line materials are the stuff of argument in Beijing as well as Woking. While teaching calculator skills, the Chinese keep faith with the traditional abacus, which often gives a quicker answer.

There will, no doubt, be opportunities for British colleges to work with Chinese counterparts. But it would be a waste of time even thinking about teaching the Chinese anything about marketing: they could learn nothing from us, indeed they probably invented markets too. Including the ones for babies. Passengers boarding the plane to leave China included some 20 American couples clutching a surplus Chinese tot in one hand and teddy bears, comforters and feeding-bottles in the other. Born in China, raised and developed in the West: a fair exchange for educational ideas going in the reverse direction.

Michael Austin retired this summer as principal of Accrington and Rossendale College