Human resource development is one of the theories guiding China's development of secondary vocational education. Secondary vocational education has always played a role in human resource training and development from the nation's founding to the present. In Chinese society today, however, there is a clear instrumentalist tendency in secondary vocational education's focus on human resource development, which has become a dilemma constraining the development of secondary vocational education. Our empirical study in the city of Dalian found that such an instrumentalist talent development trend appears primarily in the following areas: employment-oriented training models, interest-driven school management, and local conservatism in development planning.