China is the worlds second largest economy. After four decades of economic miracles, Chinas economy is transitioning into an advanced, knowledge-based economy. Yet, we still lack a detailed understanding of the skills that underly the Chinese labor force, and the development and spatial distribution of these skills. For example, the US standardized skill taxonomy O*NET played an important role in understanding the dynamics of manufacturing and knowledge-based work, as well as potential risks from automation and outsourcing. Here, we use Machine Learning techniques to bridge this gap, creating Chinas first workforce skill taxonomy, and map it to O*NET. This enables us to reveal workforce skill polarization into social-cognitive skills and sensory-physical skills, and to explore the Chinas regional inequality in light of workforce skills, and compare it to traditional metrics such as education. We build an online tool for the public and policy makers to explore the skill taxonomy: skills.sysu.edu.cn. We will also make the taxonomy dataset publicly available for other researchers upon publication.
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