An excellent outcome on China’s yearly nationwide civil service test is a requirement for any Chinese prospect who wishes to be thought about for the 10s of countless uninhabited civil service tasks that the federal government looks for to fill every year.
Much of the uninhabited positions are scheduled for current Chinese graduates.
When 22-year-old current graduate Du Xin took a seat for the examination in December in 2015 at a test centre in the city of Shijiazhuang in China’s Hebei province, she had actually been studying intensely for 6 months.
Some candidates even employ tutors to prepare them for the examination.
Prospects are checked broadly on their basic understanding and analytical abilities while in more current years they have actually likewise been checked on their grasp of “Xi believed”– Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ideology and vision for China.
Regardless of her months of preparation, Du understood that the chances that her test outcome would bring her closer to a federal government task were slim.
As she started the examination, so, too, did countless other Chinese youths throughout numerous Chinese cities.
“The competitors is strong,” Du informed Al Jazeera.
That year the opportunity of protecting a civil service position was 70 to one.
Du was stunned and delighted when she discovered that she did well on the test and consequently landed a task as an organiser at the regional workplace of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shijiazhuang.
This year, the competitors seemed a lot more intense as the variety of prospects taking a seat for the test at the end of November went beyond 3 million for the very first time.
The variety of uninhabited federal government positions has actually not maintained, reducing the chances of protecting a task like Du’s from 70 to 1 to 77 to 1, according to the state-run Global Times.
Du is not shocked by the high variety of candidates.
“I believe a great deal of youths in China truly desire a steady task today,” she stated.
Task security is an ‘iron rice bowl’
The appeal of steady work was what drew Du to the civil service examination in 2015 at a time of financial chaos in China.
“I felt a bit lost after I completed my graduate research studies, I didn’t understand what I wished to do,” she informed Al Jazeera. “But I understood I desired a task where I might feel safe and have downtime, which made me thinking about federal government work.”
Work in China’s civil service seldom pays as well as equivalent work in the Chinese personal sector, there are other advantages. Civil servants generally have access to much better medical insurance coverage, a preferential pension, constant perk pay-outs and safe and secure life time work.
The security that includes a public position has actually generated the label, “iron rice bowl”.
Iron rice bowls are longed for by some conventional Chinese moms and dads for their kids– not simply for stability however due to the fact that some see acquiring such tasks as an acknowledgment of quality by the state.
A crucial element of life as a civil servant for Du is the working hours.
“I work from 9am to 5pm, and I do not need to deal with weekends,” Du stated.
A number of Du’s pals in the economic sector work the 996 system– 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.
“Compared to them, I have a lot more downtime to enjoy my pastimes,” she stated.
Yang Jiang was likewise not amazed by the record variety of candidates for China’s civil service examination this year.
Jiang is a scholar of China’s financial policies and a senior scientist at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
The variety of candidates has actually been growing rapidly in the last few years, and according to Jiang, one factor is the similarly high variety of Chinese graduates going into the task market.
In 2023 alone, nearly 11.6 million Chinese completed their research studies, the greatest number ever.
The overarching factor for the high number of civil service test candidates is the Chinese economy, Jiang informed Al Jazeera.
“The financial circumstance doubts in China,” she stated.
The Chinese economy has actually been having a hard time to reach the development rates of earlier years, the real estate market remains in the inmost downturn in years and foreign direct financial investment struck a deficit in the July-September duration of 2023 for the very first time taped.
For Chinese graduates, situations look especially grim: youth joblessness struck a record high of 21.3 percent in June before the authorities stopped releasing the numbers.
“The economic sector in specific has actually seen a great deal of layoffs in the financial slump,” Jiang discussed.
“That has actually naturally made more Chinese graduates look towards the general public sector for the sort of task security that is presently missing out on in the economic sector,” she stated.
‘They can’t make us vanish’
Like Du, 23-year-old Chris Liao from Guangdong province in southern China finished in 2015 with a master’s degree in public administration. He likewise registered for the civil service test.
“I didn’t make it past the composed examination,” he informed Al Jazeera.
Later on, Liao was not able to discover a task within his discipline, requiring him to work as a cook for a while before he returned with his moms and dads outside Guangzhou, the biggest city in Guangdong.
He is now amongst the countless out of work youths in China.
“I seem like life got truly hard when COVID struck and since it hasn’t stopped getting challenging,” he discussed.
Liao thinks that the federal government’s COVID-19 technique is the reason for a number of the financial issues afflicting China today.
“So it is the federal government’s obligation to do more to make the scenario much better,” he stated.
According to observers, the a great deal of jobless youth in China’s significant cities is a substantial cause for issue for the party-state.
One Communist organisation in Liao’s Guangzhou even provided a strategy in March about sending out jobless youths to the countryside to cultivate rural advancement.
Such a strategy hearkens back to Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s throughout which time countless metropolitan youths were sent out to the countryside in a duration of political and social turmoil that triggered the deaths of a minimum of 2 million individuals.
In January, President Xi likewise discussed Chinese youths “revitalising” the countryside.
Liao does not think that such strategies are reasonable in modern-day times.
“They can’t make us vanish into the countryside,” he stated.
“There are a lot of people, and we are growing in number.”