I’d promised two current-affairs commentaries plus two book reviews every week, but my habitual procrastination put me off for a whole week. Starting today, I’m officially kicking into gear. The commentaries and reviews may be very short in length; their main purpose is to keep me in writing shape. The long-parked conference travelogue will also be produced sometime in the next few days.
Today is the day of the national civil service exam. I hear that this year’s number of applicants has fallen to the lowest level in five years. Perhaps that is because civil service pay has declined; perhaps it is because young people nowadays are increasingly opinionated; or perhaps parents today are becoming more open-minded. In any case, it is a good thing. Of course, the real situation may not be so optimistic. The so-called drop in applicants is not particularly significant, and civil servants are still regarded by students and their parents as the first choice for a post-graduation path. The number applying for the civil service is still well over a million, remaining within the same order of magnitude as the number of graduating students.
This is a rather “the more you think about it, the scarier it gets” sort of thing. In this country, where exam-oriented education reigns supreme, so many young people pour all their passion into one exam after another, and only into exams. The eventual result of this whole sequence of exams is a stable golden rice bowl. In other words, what many people ultimately pursue is so-called “stability.” Put differently, after taking this whole string of exams, a young person’s fiery passion is, as it were, burned out.
What “exam-oriented” means is that all that effort and struggle is only for the sake of getting through an exam, and once the exam is over, those “abilities” have almost no further use.
I have also looked at some civil service exam questions. Aside from many elementary-school olympiad math problems, which can be said to reflect a bit of mental sharpness, the overwhelming majority of the questions are utterly boring. Compared with the college entrance examination, which at least includes serious subjects like mathematics and physics, the national civil service exam is even more “exam for exam’s sake,” screening for the sake of screening. For such an exam, many students and parents still treat it as if facing a great enemy. It is truly both laughable and exasperating.
Striving for the college entrance examination is, after all, still worthwhile, because what we are fighting for is an opportunity to go to university, and university means the beginning of “freedom.” Only in university does an open, plural future truly unfold before the young. Although society itself is more open and diverse, if one steps directly into society after middle school graduation without passing through the buffer of university, young people accustomed to exam-taking can too easily sink into busyness and lose sight of what they are pursuing. And the “leisure” that university provides is crucial: we need to “waste” this period of time in which we temporarily lose a clear purpose, so that we can better discover our own pursuits later on. (As for the meaning of university lying in waste, I’ll write another article about that later.)
But there are also many people who have never, from beginning to end, walked out of the one-dimensional system of exam-oriented education. They have not discovered, or do not dare to face, the openness and plurality of the future; instead, they always hope to shelter within some established, safe, one-way track. In that case, the civil service is their best choice, perhaps even their only choice.
Of course, we cannot expect every young person to have the spirit of a pirate, to embrace plurality, and to bravely bear freedom. After all, freedom is still too heavy for most people. The masses would rather attach themselves to the shelter of others, such as parents, teachers, or the government.
But the irony is that in China, even if we are content to be ordinary folk, content with a sheltered and secure occupation, the civil service is actually not a very good choice.
In my view, the benefits of becoming a civil servant are all short-term. For example, it is relatively easy to solve the problem of household registration in a big city. Although the role of household registration will inevitably be reduced or abolished in the long run, in the next few years, and perhaps even the next decade or more, it is still likely to be an identity that is quite useful for surviving in China’s big cities. Another short-term benefit is, of course, making one’s parents happy for a while and earning a bit of face among relatives and friends. This benefit is very concrete. After all, the people who think civil servants are good are basically blind conformists who follow the crowd, and the opinions of those around them have a very large influence on such people. Getting into the civil service is undoubtedly a way of having something to say to relatives and friends, and one of the best options for resisting the “other people’s children” comparison in front of one’s parents. As for choosing some field that only interests you, or some emerging area that you believe has a great future but no dazzling past, the elders naturally find it hard to understand; and then there is nothing to show off, and therefore it becomes difficult to receive support. Even someone as free and easy as I am cannot completely ignore the feelings of elders, let alone those young people whose wills are already weak to begin with.
By the way, although I hope that a good parent, especially a father, should be a child’s rear support rather than vanguard, and should provide a reliable fallback route from which the child can eventually receive support no matter what setbacks they encounter, rather than an ready-made future path that makes the child give up choosing for themselves, in reality there are very few such parents. More parents are fond of talking about their own failures (which sounds ironic, but is the truth), feeling that their significance lies in preventing their children from taking detours, without realizing that they are actually depriving their children of the future. In fact, the reason the future is the future lies precisely in its uncertainty. Especially in our rapidly changing present, where “three years make a generation gap,” each generation will face a completely different new world, and each generation will walk its own unique “detours.” No matter how many “failed experiences” elders have, those are all things of the past, and cannot replace the difficulties that young people are bound to experience in their own era. Just as life experience does not make elders more likely than children to adapt to computers—in fact, it is quite the opposite: children are always more easily adapted to new technologies. Why? Because children are less afraid of challenges and failure, whereas adults, once they discover that their established experience cannot handle new problems, begin to shrink back, dare not probe independently, and quickly ask others for help. Children, by contrast, have no such scruples; they are brave in probing an unknown environment, and when confronted with failure they do not panic and lose all sense of direction. So they can quickly adapt to these new environments. Computer experts are all grown through one crash after another. Adapting to a new era is less like the hard struggle of going up to the mountains and down to the countryside, and more like adapting to electronic products. In this respect, the more experience elders have, the more often it becomes a burden. This logic is actually not hard to understand, but it is hard for elders to accept.
Applying for the civil service for short-term gain is of course unobjectionable, but doing civil service work for the sake of a long-term future is rather ridiculous. The so-called benefits of the civil service, apart from the short-term effects mentioned above, amount to little more than pay, benefits, and stability. Yet these advantages may be reliable for a few years, but what about decades later? By the time this batch of young people’s youth has passed, and by the time they truly need to enjoy “stability,” will the world still be the same? In my view, that is impossible in any case. If the civil service system remains a steel rice bowl detached from market mechanisms, and if the compensation attached to that rice bowl remains so high, then China’s economic and political situation will never be able to remain peaceful for long; an unbalanced system will sooner or later collapse. And if we hope that China’s economic environment can develop steadily, then institutional reform is the necessary path, just as the institutional welfare mechanisms that stood against the market—such as guaranteed job assignment for graduates, welfare housing allocation, and the steel rice bowls of state-owned enterprises—have been broken one by one over the past decades. The breaking of the civil service’s institutional welfare is probably only a matter of time.
Perhaps for one reason or another, the civil service steel rice bowl will not be broken for decades to come. That is certainly possible, just as a society like North Korea can persist for so many years without disintegrating. But this kind of “stability” is obviously not the sort that can put people at ease. Unless one is deceiving oneself—an ostrich burying its head in the sand may of course feel safe, but that is purely a misunderstanding.
To seek stability in an uncertain future, one approach is to reject the future and remain on the established, ready-made track of the past. But that is like walking on a tightrope: once you fall, it is very hard to return to where you were. A better approach is to face uncertainty directly and cultivate one’s ability to cope with the unknown. And this ability is not some programmable procedure that can be taught as a doctrine. Just as children adapt to electronic products more easily than elders do, it is not because they are better at reading the instruction manual. This ability is precisely what is hardest to cultivate under the shelter of authority.
Here I won’t talk much for the time being about idealism, nor do I want to say too much about the difference between a career and a profession (civil service is also a line of work lacking “professional ethics,” and it is difficult for it to become a person’s “career” in any substantive sense). Instead, I am trying to talk about some truths that even ordinary elders might be able to understand. But in fact I’m afraid even this will fail to move them in the slightest, because for people who are used to following the crowd, “they” are much more persuasive than “I” am.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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