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November 7, 2014

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Public servant jobs become a broken dream

By Zhang Qian | November 7, 2014, Friday | Print Edition

AFTER seven years of working as an ordinary public servant in Beijing, 30-year-old Angela Zhang finally made up her mind to quit this year and move on to a new career.

“I technically served there for exactly seven years — not one day more or one day less,” says Zhang. “But I only found the job increasingly unfulfilling and the life increasingly difficult, with a salary that grew even slower than a snail crawls.”

The Hangzhou woman graduated from a top foreign language university in Beijing 2007 and was one of the very few to pass the Public Servant Employment Examination (PSEE). She was hired by a government-related council for promoting international trade.

Zhang was thrilled at the time and looked forward to a stable and decent job with many overseas working opportunities. But trifles like copying and dealing with various forms and documents occupied much of Zhang’s working time. She often found herself accomplishing nothing after a day of hard work. And her monthly salary grew only from 4,000 yuan in 2007 to 5,000 yuan in 2014.

“When I look back now, the general public’s desire to be a public servant, including myself, was quite like a bubble in the sun,” says Zhang. “The outsiders are just enchanted by its beautiful outlook, but only those in it know the emptiness inside.”

Public servant, once the hottest job in China, is gradually losing its luster. The number of applicants for the PSEE dropped for the first time in late 2013, and it declined again recently.

About 1.4 million people completed the application to take the 2015 test before the October 25 deadline — a decrease of 115,000 from last year. And with more positions available this year, the admission rate for next year will reach 1 in 64, better odds than the rate of 1 in 77 last year.

And some public servants like Zhang are quitting the once-considered “gold bowl” job.

David Luo, a 33-year-old lawyer in Shanghai, quit his public servant job last year. He thinks he made the right decision and wrote about his experience online — “Personal Narrative of a Post-80s Public Servant” — earlier this year. It received lots of clicks.

An outstanding student at school and a pride of the family since childhood, Luo found his confidence and ambition worn out during his seven years working at a governmental department.

A voice of “leaving here and striking out for another world” kept ringing in his head for years until a university reunion party in 2013 cracked all his remaining self-consolation and fear of an uncertain future.

Many of his classmates had great achievements within the past 10 years. Some were legal supervisors of big enterprises and some were well-known lawyers. They talked heatedly about apartment pricing over 6 million yuan, stock accounts with at least 1 million yuan funds and children studying in private schools.

“But I just felt freezing inside as the once-top student among them but now an ordinary public servant with nothing but meaningless experience and skills,” says Luo.

Regardless of all the efforts that Luo made at work, his salary was never raised, and his position remained the same. All his social networks were either his leaders or colleagues.

“The government department never lacks talented and hard-working people, but promotion opportunities for the young ... very few post-1980s can get promoted as the post-1970s have take the middle-level leadership positions already, while the rest are just consuming their lives here. And I do not want to be one of those,” Luo says.

Though in his 30s, Luo believed that he still had the chance to make a difference. It only took him a week to make the decision and quit. He now works at a law firm, busy learning new things and mastering new skills.

“I believe that it is only shackles that I lost, and I will get a world instead,” says Luo.

The decreasing number of public servant applicants and increasing number of quitters are a good sign, showing the public realizes the limited job value, says sociologist Gu Xiaoming.

“Public servant is just an ordinary job that once was overvalued by the public,” says Gu. “It is not and also should not be a fat position that many people imagined it to be, just because of some corrupted officials.”

He thinks the trend will be for the applicant pool to decline more in the coming years, with more people jettisoning their misunderstanding of the job.

“Their quitting will help leave room for the ones who really want to be a servant for the public, and that is good,” says Gu.

But there are still only a very limited number of public servants who dare to take the action of leaving the “gold bowl” behind.

With a monthly income of 7,000 to 8,000 yuan, community police officer James Jia, 31, considers his a low-value job when it comes to pay. He usually works 40 to 70 hours a week, not including provisional work. And the general social environment for law enforcement is getting worse, he says.

“There are people who are very difficult to cope with. We have to be very careful in case we should get a complaint,” says Xia. “It may be even more exhausting than street patrol. I always feel like quitting.”

Though many police officers in his office share that sentiment, only one has quit within the seven years Xia has worked there, and that was to work with his wife, a rich businesswoman.

“I don’t know or I don’t have the time to really think about what I can do after quitting. The stability of the job is still attractive,” says Jia.

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