Somewhat fictional Chinese job description: high-prestige, high-paying job with guaranteed housing, transportation and benefits for life. College education, connections, and test-taking ability required. One in sixty applicants offered employment, and demand – based upon five-year trends – likely to double.
Microsoft R&D engineer? Coal mine baron? KTV manager?
Just before Chinese New Year Xinhua reported that 640,000 people sat for China’s 2008 civil service examination (andexam which requires a college education). Of these, only one in sixty become government employees. That’s not only tough, it’s getting tougher. According to Xinhua, in 2007 the ratio of success to failure was one in forty-seven (other sources claim one-in-forty-two). And it doesn’t pay to wait: next year, fully 800,000 applicants are expected to take the test, which should drive the ratio to roughly eighty-to-one.
One possible explanation of this trend – and the one that many Chinese government officials would likely prefer to maintain – is that China’s public sector is shrinking with the growth of its private sector. But that would be the wrong explanation: again, according to Xinhua, the 2006 version of the exam attracted 370,000 test-takers – almost half the total who took the 2008 edition (one in forty-three made it). And though I can’t locate the number of test-takers for the 2005 version, Xinhua tells us that the success ratio was a relatively easy thirty-seven to one.
That is to say, applicants to China’s civil service have nearly doubled over the last four years. And that doubling doesn’t include the growth in applicants to China’s provincial, municipal, county, and township civil services.
So – why the steady growth in applicants to China’s civil service? In 2004, when civil service applicants were fewer, the Guangzhou Research Institute of Youth in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao, surveyed “more than” 500 “young people” and found that fully 46.3% aspired to “[P]arty and government departments, bureaux and organizations.” At the time, in 2004, Guangdong was flush with cash, labor, an undervalued currency and – I was told, at least – entrepreneurial spirit. But, according to the survey, only 7.1% aspired to private businesspeople.
I don’t want to give too much credence to a four-year-old survey done in, um, Guangdong. I mention it mostly because it validates my own observations and experiences with young Chinese job applicants. Nevertheless, I can’t help but wonder if – considering the rising cost of labor in Guangdong – if the numbers wouldn’t skew even more toward civil service if the survey were retaken today?
A brief digression.
For the last few decades US professional schools have gone through periods of boom and bust – but mostly boom – on the perceived value of three graduate degrees: law, medicine, and the MBA. There’s little question that any of these degrees will all-but-guarantee a graduate’s future earning power, and quickly. That said, they are not immune from economic trends. If Wall Street is in a slump, US business schools are less likely to see growth in applicants (partly because Wall Street isn’t hiring). Meanwhile, graduate programs in law, in particular, often surge in popularity during an economic downturn as risk-averse applicants weather the uncertainty in an expensive but safe bet on future earnings. Due to higher academic thresholds (organic chemistry, cell biology, calculus, oh my) for admission, medical schools tend not to be buffeted by macroeconomic trends so much as trends within the health care economy in general, such as the rising influence of non-medical players like insurance companies. In the US, at least, it’s the rare medical school applicant who doesn’t meet a middle-aged physician ready to retire early because of the meddling role played by major health insurers.
Back to China. Though the Chinese economy remains relatively closed in some sectors, it’s open enough for macro-economic factors, as well as cultural and political factors, to drive people certain kinds of professional exams. Without generalizing too far, it seems fairly uncontroversial to state that many if not most Chinese college graduates – and the parents of those college graduates – prefer the stable, guaranteed income (the proverbial “iron rice bowl”) of a job in the bureaucracy to the less certain prospects inherent in a potentially more lucrative job in a private-sector growth industry. Thus, despite Xinhua’s predilection for making up quotes and characters, I’m inclined to believe this one on principle, if nothing else:
“Everyone knows there is a very small chance of getting a post. But we don’t want to miss the chance,” said Xiao Guang, a postgraduate student in his late 20s at a Beijing university.
He gave up a job that paid an annual salary of 100,000 yuan ($13,500) in a foreign-funded company.
“I will trade a job with an annual salary of 200,000 yuan ($27,000) for a position in a government agency,” he said.
There’s little question that Chinese civil servants are capable of making far more money than 200,000 yuan/year. Back in 2005, in a strange and glorious moment of candor, Xinhua reported that civil servants at the vice-ministerial level and above can expect to be compensated with a 180 square meter apartment and an Audi Sedan – both of which exceed 200,000 yuan in value, respectively. And that’s just what happens in Beijing. Elsewhere in China, Audis might be just the beginning. For example, Shanghai’s French concession is packed with block after block of colonial villas protected by walls, gates, and police, most of which are occupied – as anyone on the street can tell you – by civil servants.
Put more simply, stability isn’t enough to attract growing numbers of Chinese job seekers; there must be a financial incentive. Like US-based MBA programs in a bull market, Chinese civil service jobs attract growing number s of applicants because they offer financial incentives, and lots of them. College graduates are just following the money – and the safe money is in government!
Is this a problem? Some members of China’s civil service certainly seem to think so – at least as evidenced by recent editorials on the subject in the Chinese media, such as this one. Me, I tend to see this as part of a larger set of issues, including increasing rates of unemployment for recent college graduates. Certainly, too, a society which lacks a proper social welfare system for its senior citizens will place a premium on stable high-paying jobs for the children of those seniors.
A few years ago when my classmates took the civil service exams, one of the main attractions was the prospect of a big-city hukou, something that wasn’t guaranteed by private industry or even jobs with government-affiliated work units.
Why would any new college grad want to get a job sitting in an office with five other middle aged civil servants listening to them rambling on and on about other office mates their kids and what for dinner and enduring being their new target of patronization?
A fair question and let me guess… So that one day he too could sit in an office with five other middle-aged civil servants secure in their jobs, sure of their lives, to ramble on and on about other office mates, their kids, what for dinner, and of course to patronize the new boy.