The two-year community college model has historically been a uniquely US phenomenon. Increasingly, however, this model and adaptations of it are growing internationally, both through partnerships with community colleges in the United States and as adaptations to existing postsecondary vocational-education systems in developing countries. In this study, the authors look at higher education in China, and more specifically at "higher professional and technical colleges" or HPTCs (gaodeng zhiye jishu xueyuan or gaozhi). HPTCs are the sector of Chinese higher education most closely resembling the traditional community college model. The late 1990s and early 2000s marked a change in thinking about HPTCs, from terminal institutions aimed at imparting high-level specialized technical and management skills to institutions incorporating both academic and vocational purposes, and serving as a pathway to the country's more elite senior colleges and universities. More recently, however, contractions in China's top-up policy (i.e. a policy aimed at using the HPTC sector as a bridge to the university sector) reflect a return to more bifurcated thinking about the relationship between the non-university and university sectors. The authors explore these policy shifts and find (unsurprisingly) that the HPTC sector is highly sensitive to top-up policy changes. Surprisingly, however, the authors find that the university sector is also impacted, though in less expected ways.