The Development Of Higher Vocational Education In Building Harmonious Society

China now is sparing no effort to construct harmonious socialist society under the Scientific Outlook on Development. As an inseparable part of social development, higher vocational education is at present a focus of governments'attention. The coordinated development of higher vocational education is of significance to promote a sound and fast development of China's economy and to realize the goals of higher education restructuring. Higher vocational education offers a strong support of wisdom to China's industrial structure optimization, and to the shift of economic growth modes, the construction of innovation-oriented country as it trains high-caliber technological personnel needed at the forefront of production, management and service. Under the School-running policy of Offering Top Services to Society and Aiming at Employment Orientation, it is also of importance for the construction of harmonious socialist society as it offers the masses an equal opportunity to receive higher education and the graduates more job opportunities, meets the needs of the intellectuals training for the social development and the building of a life-long learning and innovation-oriented country.Starting relatively late, China's higher vocational education has been making great progress, and made up half of the entire higher education nowadays. During the process of its development, we need to carry on careful research on and find out immediate solutions to the lagged effects brought up by large development scale, the ideas and teaching methods, and the imbalance of development in different regions, which has a negative impact on the harmonious development of higher vocational education itself.Based on the current situation in China, especially in the West China, the features of harmonious socialist society has firstly been reviewed and discussed in this paper, with a comparative study of domestic and abroad theories and practice. And then the role of higher vocational education in constructing a harmonious socialist society has been analyzed and dissertated from the perspectives of sociology, economics and politics. Finally the author of this paper has probed into the problems and challenges facing higher vocational education in Sichuan province and put forward suggestions about how to solve the problems and meet the challenges by learning from the successful experience of the foreign countries in their ideas of school running, and their building modes and management mechanism, which is hoped to be helpful to safeguard a sound and fast development of higher vocational education in the West China.