The main difference is Germany actually puts money in vocational education and values it socially.
China does not.
China's education spend is only 4.1% of GDP, and much of that is diverted to academic high schools and universities. Furthermore, vocational students are viewed as "bad students" and good faculty prefer to join academic high schools or private high schools due to a better salary and social standing. Furthermore, even SOE factories (the traditional hirer of vocational students) in China now prefer hiring college graduates instead of vocational students because of a glut of college graduates due to cultural shifts in the 2000s-2010s, anti-vocational student bias, and college graduates trying to get a stable "iron rice bowl" (to use the Korean term) government job.
> I think you describe that it is very similar today in China after they banned the private tutoring a couple of years back. So, we are somehow back to “work hard on not to unequal grounds and your personal merit/luck will determine your future”
I think that was the aim of the legislation, but in action it didn't help social mobility much, because upper income households just resorted to private or online tutoring, and everyone ignores it.
It's not like legislators send their kids to vocational schools - they also prefer to send them to academic or top private schools so that they can then attend university (either domestically or abroad).
> but it does not seem to be “instrumented in a way to keep certain groups out of academia based on income or social standing”.
In face value it doesn't, but in action urban academic high schools and primary schools get the lions share of funding, and until recently those are gatekept to people holding a hukou for that city.
This meant that urban migrants who weren't able to convert their rural hukou to an urban hukuo (because that meant losing their rural landholdings which is the only asset of worth they have), and their kids were stuck either in underfunded rural schools or crappy private primary schools in an urban area.
This has a significant impact on social mobility to this day, and is a major reason why China's median household income remains very low. Urban China's median household income is $6,000, but rural China's is around $3,000. This means the bottom half of urban society in China and much of rural China's society does not have much of a chance of upward mobility because they can't pay for private tutoring nor can they afford a good private high school if their kid fails the Zhongkao.