Archives May 2013

New Contracts for Civil Servants to go National

This is an extended abstract of an article that appeared in this week’s edition of The Economic Observer, for more highlights from the EO print edition, click here.

By the end of 2013, numerous provinces and cities across China will have launched pilot programs implementing fixed-term contracts in the hiring of civil servants. By the end of 2014, the contract system may be implemented nationwide.

Shenzhen was the first city to launch the contract system, doing so in 2007. Shenzhen was followed by Shanghai in 2008, and Jiangxi, Henan, Fujian, Liaoning, and Guangxi provinces in 2012. Jiangsu, Sichuan, Shanxi and Shandong provinces are expected to launch contract systems by the end of 2013.

When Shenzhen initially implemented the contract system it hired 41 civil servants. Now, Shenzhen hires all new civil servants through the contract system. Currently there are 3,000 civil servants under the contract system in Shenzhen, with another 500 to be added later this year.

The new contract system allows for more flexibility in the process of hiring officials. Applicants can be recruited directly and might be able to avoid the extended series of exams and interviews that others hoping to land a public service job are forced to go through.

The new system also differs from existing hiring practices in relation to how the salary package for such civil servants are determined. Traditionally, renumeration for most civil service positions are centrally determined according to their level. Under these new fixed-term contracts, employees enter into a wage agreement with the department hiring them and thus have more room to negotiate. The final salary of public servants that have been recruited according to the new contract system are determined by the contract they sign with the department.

Zhu Lijia (???), a professor at the Public Management Teaching and Research Department and director of the Public Administration Department at the China National School of Administration, says that the lack of regulations covering the direct recruitment of civil servants and the process of negotiating a salary package means that the system is open to abuse.

The new contract system is mainly used for recruiting highly-skilled professionals.

Liang Yuping (???), director of the Civil Servant Management Department at the Chinese Academy of Personnel Science, and Peng Jianfeng (???), a professor at the School of Labor and Personnel at Renmin University of China, believe that the contract system helps to both motivate and supervise civil servants.

However, Li Jianzhong (???), a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Personnel Science, told the EO that preventing people becoming civil servants through direct recruitment and preventing local governments from providing unreasonably high wages to civil servants, is the best way to guard against corruption.

Last year over 1.5 million people registered to take the national civil service exam. They were competing for approximately 20,800 positions.

Liu Xin, a professor at the Institute of Organization and Human Resources at Renmin University, recently explained to Time Magazine why so many Chinese graduates are attracted to a career in the country’s civil service. “As a civil servant in China, unless you quit or make a big mistake, you have a job for life,” he said. “It’s the iron rice bowl. That’s especially important during an economic downturn.”

The roll out of these new fixed-term contracts along with mounting job pressures, may begin to alter this perception.

Large tungsten mine discovered in E China

Geologists have discovered a large tungsten mine in east China’s Jiangxi Province, officials said Thursday.

More than 1 million tonnes of tungsten and associated copper have been found at the mine in the Zhuxi mineral area of Fuliang County in the northeast part of the province, said Peng Zezhou, chief of the provincial geology and mineral resources exploration bureau.

The Ministry of Land and Resources confirmed the discovery on Wednesday on its website.

A maximum depth of 449 meters of tungsten and 30 meters of associated copper in the mine has been penetrated, said Peng.
The reserve explored is in the same province as the world’s largest tungsten mine, which was found in Wuning County, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi. It holds tungsten reserves totalling 1.06 million tonnes.

Geologists said they expect to find more tungsten at the newly-discovered mine, which could oust the mine in Wuning County as the world’s largest.

Alarming drop in Chinese graduates landing jobs

Yang Biao has spent every weekend for the past two months at job fairs. The 25-year-old, who will finish a Chinese literature degree at Beijing University of Technology in July, has also sent out nearly 200 job applications.

“I do feel like I’m running out of time and I’m getting more anxious as each day passes,” he said. “But I can only cross my fingers and hope I will no longer need to live off my parents.”

Yang is one of a record nearly seven million students who will graduate from mainland universities this year and enter the job market during a marked economic slowdown.

By early this month, 52.4 per cent of mainland students about to graduate had signed job contracts, down seven percentage points on the same time last year. In the industrial hub of Guangdong, the rate was 46 per cent, and in Beijing, home to such top universities as Peking and Tsinghua, it was just 33.6 per cent.

Graduates majoring in English, law, computer science and technology, accounting, international trade and industrial and commercial administration are finding it harder to find jobs.

President Xi Jinping made a high-profile visit to a job fair in Tianjin on May 14 to reassure jobseekers, pledging to create more jobs by boosting economic growth. Xi told the graduates he met that having a job was the foundation of people’s livelihood and that employment struggles were becoming a global problem, Xinhua said. He was quoted as saying that only economic development could help improve the situation.

A day later, Premier Li Keqiang chaired a State Council meeting that outlined several measures designed to keep the employment rate for graduates no lower than last year.

The State Council also promised to tackle discrimination and inequality in the job market and to provide jobseekers from poor families with one-off allowances to help them find jobs.

Yang, from a rural family, said more than half his classmates were still looking for a job by the middle of this month. Because he was about to graduate from a less prestigious university, he did not expect a well-paid job, just one that could support him.

He said he had turned down a job offer from a Beijing kindergarten with a base salary of 1,700 yuan (HK$2,130) a month because it was not enough to make ends meet, given that he would have to move out of his parents’ home on Beijing’s outskirts to work in the city centre. Yang tried to get into a postgraduate school to further his studies and boost his competitive edge, but failed the entrance exam in February.

Another jobseeker, Ji Yinrui , said the cost of pre-employment accreditation courses in the computer and IT sector was a bigger problem for him than the tight job market. Ji, who will graduate from a university in Tianjin with a degree in computer science and technology, said many big-name employers in the computer and information technology sector required newly graduated jobseekers to take accreditation courses from privately run career training institutions as a condition for recruitment.

But such courses, which lasted up to six months and cost between 10,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan, were beyond the reach of jobseekers like him from poor rural families.

“I understand the employers’ concerns about a general lack of workplace skills among graduates nowadays, but isn’t that an issue about how we’ve been taught in universities?” he said. “Because what we’re required to learn at the private training schools is exactly what we should have been taught at university, especially during our last semester.”

Ji’s hunt began in November and he has given himself another two months to land a job, even a part-time one, because he says it is time to stop relying on his parents and stand on his own feet.

Citing a survey by the National University Student Information and Career Centre, China Central Television reported on May 19 that demand for recruits by employers with more than 1,000 employees was down by 3.6 per cent compared with last year.

A university degree no longer guarantees a decent job on the mainland because a reckless, government-led push for expansion since the late 1990s has seen the number graduating each year more than triple in the past decade.

The prospects of landing highly sought-after positions at government agencies and state-owned enterprises are often linked to power and money.

Some 500 college graduates in Shanxi lost tens of millions of yuan between 2008 and last year to a rogue job agency in a scam in which they were each swindled out of between 200,000 yuan and 500,000 yuan paid in return for promises of jobs in the state-owned sector.

As competition in the job market gets fiercer, those from less privileged families also face all sorts of discrimination and administrative barriers.

Zhao Lili , a postgraduate student in Beijing originally from Henan , said she faced twin difficulties in job hunting – as a woman and someone without Beijing household registration, or hukou.

“Many recruiters have shown no interest in me after learning that I’m not a local resident because they think I’m more of a liability than a local applicant,” she said.

Zhao, who is studying business management, said a far larger proportion of male students in her faculty had found jobs than had female students.

Xiong Bingqi , deputy director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute, said governments needed to play a bigger role in creating jobs, boosting transparency in recruitment and addressing inequality in access to sought-after positions.

Xiong also warned against a public preoccupation with statistics about the job outlook for university graduates, which could put pressure on universities to doctor their employment figures and force students to rush into jobs they disliked.

Studies by Mycos Data, a mainland consultancy specialising in higher education, show that 38 per cent of university graduates in 2009 left their jobs after six months.

“So job-creation efforts for college graduates are not a seasonal issue, but should begin shortly after students enter universities and continue all the way through the first three or five years of their career and even longer,” Xiong said.

44% of university seniors secure jobs

More than 44 percent of university seniors in the city have secured jobs after graduation as of Friday, down 2 percentage points from the same period in 2012, the Shanghai Evening Post reported Monday.

The closely watched statistic, which local universities track annually, shows the proportion of graduating seniors who have signed employment agreements so far this year. The number has received a lot of attention recently from local media outlets, many of which have proclaimed 2013 as the toughest year in recent memory for graduating seniors seeking their first job.

The Shanghai Municipal Education Commission disputes that assessment. The commission called a press conference Monday to assert that the figure is in line with past years.

The situation is no worse than it was from 2009 to 2011, said Li Ruiyang, the commission’s deputy director.

The gap between this year’s and last year’s figures gradually closed over the course of April, which is the month when many seniors begin signing employment agreements, Li said.

As of April 10, the agreement signing rate was 4.07 percentage points lower than the previous year, according to the commission. By April 25, the gap had shrunk to 3.17 percentage points.

There are 152,000 positions available for the city’s 178,000 graduating seniors this year, though the commission predicts that about 48,000 graduates will choose to continue their education rather than enter the labor market.

Although there appears to be enough open positions for the graduates, it does not mean every student will easily find a job, said Chen Dongyuan, an official from the division of employment at the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.

The proportion of students who sign an employment agreement ultimately hinges on whether graduating seniors can meet employer requirements, and vice versa, Chen said.

Many students have not been satisfied with the salaries they have been offered, while many companies have found the experience of many graduates lacking, a commission official said. The mutual dissatisfaction has also contributed to the lower agreement rate.

“One reason why the signing rate is still below 50 percent is because some students are holding out for better offers,” Chen told the Global Times. “The rate will probably rise over the next month.”

Chen said the slowdown in economic growth has also caused a drop in the number of open positions as many companies have no plans to recruit new employees.

By comparison, the signing rate for vocational students has exceeded last year’s by 1.2 percentage points. Some vocational school students have acquired an edge over university students because of the practical skills they have learned, the official said.

Chinese lessons for Yahoo’s boss

Marissa Mayer may want to take a leaf out of the Chinese HR manual when taking on the pyjamas-wearing home-workers as boss of Yahoo.

At many Chinese companies, even sinecures in the state sector, mid-level managers and above are required to keep their phones switched on and answer email within two hours – when they’re on holiday. That gives a new meaning to the concept of “work from home”: in China, it’s what you do when you ought to be on holiday.

Diligence like that comes with the territory, it seems: leisure has had a bad rap in China since the days of the iron rice bowl. And blurring the work-life boundary is nothing new either. Under communism, the party picked your job and your job determined almost everything else: where you ate, slept, birthed your offspring and even spent your dotage. Work and life were kept in perfect equilibrium – or else.

Even today, many Chinese workers find it hard to tell where work ends and life begins. Construction workers live on-site, in the same flimsy prefab shacks, festooned with seemingly the same pair of tattered underwear air-drying outside the window, throughout China. When the shack went up and the undies went out on the vacant lot opposite my home, I knew the cranes could not be long to follow.

And even after completion, Chinese apartment buildings are filled with live-ins – not maids but welders and plumbers and tilers and carpenters. Flats in China are sold as empty shells, and those who fill them with floors and walls and bathrooms and kitchens live there while they work (which is why the sound of drilling never takes a holiday either).

A few outliers in the business world have begun to sing the praises of something other than nonstop toil. Last week Jack Ma, founder of the e-commerce titans Alibaba and Taobao, used his swansong as CEO to announcethat “from tomorrow, my career is to enjoy life”.

Some Chinese companies have begun to offer lifestyle concessions to keep employees happy, says Jennifer Feng, chief HR expert at 51job, one of China’s leading recruitment agencies – such as allowing employees to refuse to take phone calls or answer emails for two to three days. Per week? Per month? “A year,” she says: two to three days out of 365.

And although that particular form of indolence known as “working from home” is out of fashion at Yahoo, where Ms Mayer has told staff to work from the office, it is getting its first tentative trials in China. One local government in Shanghai is trying to promote the concept by working with Ctrip, China’s largest, Nasdaq-listed travel agency.

Ctrip told local Chinese news that it had lowered its usual requirements for age and appearance, and focused more on honesty and responsibility when deciding which employees should be allowed to work without coming to the office.

The company’s CEO, James Liang, wrote up Ctrip’s nine-month experiment in home-working with Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom, concluding that performance increased dramatically and attrition fell sharply – while the company saved about $2,000 per employee per year worked at home.

Half of the 1,000 studied employees stayed in the office as a control group, while the other half donned their telecommuting loungewear. Attrition rates among those in pyjamas were 50 per cent below the white-collar cohort. After the experiment ended, those who chose to continue telecommuting recorded performance that was 22 per cent higher than the work-at-works.
But Ms Feng of 51job says she thinks most Chinese workers and employers do not share Ctrip’s sanguine view of the supposed win-wins of telecommuting. Some Chinese IT companies banned working at home even before Ms Meyer got around to it and others that offered staff the chance to stay home one or two days a month have not found such offers to be that popular, she says.

Most telecommuters found they were working longer, not shorter, hours, says Ms Feng. “If they work at a particular place for particular hours, that gives them a reason to refuse after-work meetings, but when they work at home?.?.?.?they are required to reply to emails within half an hour, attend meetings and distance-learning courses at night,” she says.

At that rate, they might be better off on holiday: at least that way, they get a full two hours to hit the reply button.

Recruiting overseas judges the right thing to do for now

Our judiciary remains fiercely independent,” Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok said at a luncheon address in London last week. “We uphold the rule of law and Hong Kong people enjoy a wide range of rights and freedoms.”

An independent judiciary is one of Hong Kong’s most positive attributes, especially now that the civil service’s image is somewhat tarnished. However, while the quality of judges remains high, there is a troubling shortage of suitable candidates who can move up to the bench.

One reason is that Hong Kong did not develop legal education until very late. The Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese produced its first medical graduates in 1892 but the first law graduates from the University of Hong Kong did not appear until 80 years later, in 1972. Because of that, Hong Kong’s first local judges were all British-trained. Even then, there were disincentives to serve as judges under the colonial system.

Simon Li Fook-sean, who died recently, was the first Chinese person to serve as a high court judge in 1971 and retired in 1987 when he was vice-president of the Court of Appeal. Throughout this period, he complained bitterly about the discriminatory treatment accorded local judges.

In those days, however, Hong Kong could draw on other sources for legal and administrative talent – not just from Britain but from its colonies around the world. Those expatriate judges served Hong Kong well but many are now retired or close to retirement.

None of the original judges on the Court of Final Appeal in 1997 was locally trained. Currently, only one – Patrick Chan Siu-oi – graduated from the University of Hong Kong, but he is retiring in October and will be replaced by another British-trained jurist, Joseph Fok.

Fortunately, China was pragmatic when it enacted the Basic Law. That document stipulates that only the chief justice of the Court of Final Appeal and the chief judge of the High Court must be Chinese nationals. Other judges – and other legal personnel – can be recruited overseas.

Since 1997, there has been a perhaps understandable reluctance to recruit overseas judges. But Hong Kong has no choice if it is to maintain its high standards. The city itself simply does not have the depth and breadth of legal talent.

Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma Tao-li has acknowledged the problem and said: “So far as I’m concerned, it is better to leave a position vacant than to get people who are not qualified or are not the right people.” Of course, positions cannot be left open indefinitely. Already, the waiting time for both civil and criminal cases has lengthened beyond prescribed targets.

Overseas judges are at a disadvantage in not knowing the Chinese language and the local culture. But until Hong Kong can fill the void – by training top legal minds and perhaps also by widening the pool to include more solicitors and academics – there may well be a need to recruit judges from overseas.