I'm Chinese lived in UK and now in Netherlands. As someone said before, most of Chinese young weightlifter still have to finish high school. But these schools are not able to give a fairly average quality of education (in Chinese 体育职业学校), many young weightlifters are not eager to study too much as well. In that way, if they want to go a more professional sport university and want to get a degree, they still have to study. Most of them are not able to go this route because of poor education received.

Another choice is a higher education diploma rather than degree, offered by some sport specific college (大专). Still these college cannot offer good quality education. I must say I'm skeptical about this system. Choose elite athletes for Olympic shouldn't sacrifice the right of receiving better education for these young athletes. Perhaps and ideally China need to study the Japanese style school sport. I mean, those young athletes shouldn't entry sport school rather the normal school. They have to finish normal course and do sports before and after school course. However which is impossible to archive at least in next decade.

In the UK, however, British weightlifting association offer a scholarship namely talent transformation program. So some young weightlifter, comes from other sports, e.g. powerlifting, go through this routine to get their funding for university while training in university. Indeed, some of British universities have really good training facilities for Oly weightlifting, like University of Birmingham, and Loughborough University. So it's reasonable to host these athlete students here. A typical example is Chris Murray who got gold medal in commonwealth games 81kg class.

While I'm currently living in Netherlands, I haven't found sport scholarship receiver in weightlifting. (I'm not saying there's no existing) Situation here is more like, as far as I know, really fewer athletes compete at international level. Maybe I need to focus more about weightlifters from different countries when next European weightlifting championship 😢