While some of China’s young elite yearn for government jobs, others come to regret it

BEIJING – In Beijing and cities across China, as many as 2.6 million job applicants, including graduates from top Chinese universities, will report to testing centres in early January to face exceedingly long odds and compete for 37,100 entry-level government jobs.

The national exam is an annual rite for young Chinese,

some of whom spend thousands of dollars for prep classes and many hours cramming for it. It comes at a fraught time.

The exam was supposed to be in early December, but was cancelled at the last minute.

The government cited Covid-19 lockdowns, but the exam was postponed days after protests in more than a dozen cities against China’s severe pandemic restrictions.

Jobs in China’s vast civil service have long been considered prestigious launchpads for a career.

They include entry-level roles typical in any economy, such as clerks in municipal government, and some that are unique to China, such as assisting in the country’s extensive censorship bureaucracy.

But these days, the jobs are also coveted out of necessity, because it is especially

hard for new graduates to find employment at private companies.

Nearly one in five people between the ages of 16 and 24 in China is unemployed.

Alibaba, Tencent and other tech firms have

laid off workers.

Economic growth has been battered by a sharp real estate slump, and small businesses suffered under the Covid-19 restrictions, which paralysed large parts of the country for weeks or months at a time.

Although the

zero-Covid policy has been scrapped,

the economy is not expected to quickly snap back.

“It’s just that they don’t have so many opportunities in the private sector,” said Dr Alfred Wu, a professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

The competition for public service positions is so fierce that people often refer to them with a Chinese saying: “thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge”.

The exam is rigorous. Candidates must answer about 130 multiple-choice questions covering topics such as maths, data analysis, science and economics. They are asked to write five essays of 200-1,000 words each on social issues and government policies.

Scoring highly increases the chances of getting a job, although getting hired means enduring a battery of interviews, background checks and other reviews.

Then there is the reality of civil service work. Some say their days are ruled by rigid hierarchies and involve monotonous chores. Others, while saying they enjoy their jobs, complain that their responsibilities often sprawl beyond normal work hours.

The role they had to play enforcing China’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 the past three years was a sore spot.

Ms Amy Liu, who has served as a clerk in Beijing’s municipal government for the past six years, said she mostly enjoyed her work, learnt a lot from it and found her days satisfying.

But in the past few years, she has been dragged into the zero-Covid campaign.

Like everyone in her department, she had to volunteer at virus testing sites once a week when there was a high number of cases. She was instructed to stand guard and keep crowds in line.

“This type of thing irritates me so much,” she said.

This was in addition to other required tasks unrelated to her job, such as study sessions about Communist Party history, ideology lessons organised by the propaganda department, and tutorials on law and discipline from the anti-corruption department.

These topics have taken on greater importance throughout China since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012.

Working in public service has a rich history in modern China.

Government jobs were once prized – an earlier generation called them “iron rice bowls” because of their stability. They offered security and regular work hours. But after the Chinese economy started to open up, many young people chose instead to pursue the riches and opportunities available in the private sector.

That trend has reversed under Mr Xi. The heavier involvement of the state in parts of the economy such as technology has made those private-sector jobs less attractive and harder to find, while also putting new burdens on civil service workers.

“The culture of the entire Chinese local government has changed, from encouraging the innovative economy and developing tourism to achieving the goal of political security and pleasing the supervisors,” said Dr Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society.

These jobs have been particularly tough during the pandemic.

China’s rigid policies created a thicket of rules that civil servants had to enforce, and that made front-line workers “punching bags” and “decompression valves”, the Liberation Daily, a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, stated in an April article during a lockdown in Shanghai that lasted two months.

Mr Xi has said China needed to ease the burden on lower-level government workers by reducing “formality for formality’s sake and bureaucracy”, noting how government departments in some cities force staff to complete paperwork that does not solve real problems.

But it is not clear whether the relaxation of the zero-Covid policy will change the nature of the entry-level jobs, at least in ways that will make the work more appealing.

It is a hard time for a young person to start a career in China. “They know that the opportunities generated by China’s rapid growth no longer belong to this generation,” said Dr Wu, the China expert in Singapore.

That frustration among many young people, he said, was expressed in the surge of protests that rocked China in November.

“Of course, the protests must have had something to do with Covid-19, but they also showed their desperate side,” he added.

Despite dissatisfaction with their work, some young civil servants said they felt trapped because there was no guarantee they would find something better in the private sector.

They also often felt pressured by parents who value a stable job and revel in the status of a child working for the government.

“My parents think it’s good to be a civil servant,” Ms Liu said. “They think I should never leave.”

Ms Katherine Shi has a job that, at first, sounds alluring to many young graduates: She watches television for a living.

Ms Shi is a government censor who searches for vulgarity, politically sensitive content and other forbidden subjects on TV and in movies. The job has become hard to bear, she said. Some days, she has to censor 100 hours of video and make sure nothing slips by. Even with watching videos at double speed, Ms Shi said it was impossible to deal with the workload.

She often feels conflicted at work, she added, because there are many things that she does not find objectionable but that fall under censorship guidelines.

She is ordered to censor an ever-growing list of content, such as videos about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, tattoos or so-called “lie flat” values, a counterculture approach that has gained popularity in China for embracing a lack of ambition and wanting an easy, uncomplicated life.

In a crime film, censors need to make sure that criminals are always punished.

“Culture should be very free, and you should allow the expressions of some so-called negative energy and the dark side of society because they truly exist,” Ms Shi said.

She felt that some people in the government had closed their eyes to how the world really was, she added. NYTIMES