Tibetans living in the so-called ‘Tibet autonomous region’ are turning toward civil services or other government jobs to solve the perennial problem of unemployment. A first-level clerk position in the postal administration in a small Ngari region of Tibet saw 20,000 people competing – numbers unseen before.
Though Beijing appoints more politicians from the Han ethnicity than Tibetans within the region’s political bodies, there has been a steady rise in Tibetans joining government services and political institutions inside Tibet.
In 2021, a record 2.1 million Chinese aspirants sat for the civil services exam called guokao.
The civil services positions in China are euphemistically called ‘iron rice bowl’ positions, which is a type of job that is as solid as a rice bowl made of iron, as the bureaucrats are unlikely to be asked to step down.
The Chinese civil services exam is considered challenging. The candidates need to answer 130 multiple-choice questions covering maths, data analysis, science, and economics. The candidates must also write five essays of 200 to 1,000 words each on social issues and government policies.
“’If you don’t work for the people, you might as well go home and sell sweet potatoes’ The following saying contains a profound philosophy of life. The people are the creators of history, and we must always listen to people and shape our ways of governance. Learn from our history to understand, the people should be the focus” says a sample essay on the government portal, meant for those appearing in the exam.
Scoring a high mark doesn’t guarantee the candidate will get hired. They must go through interviews and background checks.
In 2022, Beijing advertised around 31,200 national civil services positions. The government has further increased the number in 2023, adding roughly one-fifth more jobs from the year before.
The ratio of number of vacancies vs the number of applications appear balanced for the year gone by because large parts of Tibet were under lockdown due to the fresh wave of Covid. But the disparity has been worse in normal years, reflecting the state of employment in the region.
After a record two-million people appeared for the civil services exam in 2021, there was a slight dip in the number of candidates in 2023. Across China, nearly 1.74 million candidates registered to take the exam but only 1.42 million wrote it.
Also read: Wang Yi and Qin Gang—two new appointments by Xi Jinping and why they matter…
Perks of serving in Tibet
A non-Tibetan officer going to serve in Tibet can retire five years earlier compared to civil servants posted in the mainland while collecting the full pension.
Beijing offers many incentives to those from the mainland who pick to work in Tibet.
A civil servant in Tibet will earn approximately 6,000-7,000 yuan per month, which is higher than the 5,000 yuan per month salary in the mainland. Though the basic salary of civil servants in China at 5,000 yuan per month would be considered low compared to the private sector jobs in Guangdong or Shanghai, the remuneration is topped up with perks and subsidies for housing, education, transportation, medical benefits, and childcare. The bonuses offered in Tibet can also be much higher because of the physical hardships of serving in the region.
Civil servants retiring from Tibet can receive as much as 10,000 yuan/month pension, much higher than those serving in most other parts of China.
Besides the high pay for civil servants in the region, Beijing has tried to award officers of Tibetan origin to encourage others to join the civil services. In August 2022, five civil servants of Tibetan origin were honoured with a national award for their work along with other officers from across the mainland.
During the Covid wave in 2021, civil servants saw a 20-30 per cent cut in their additional subsidies.
“The total pay cut is about 25 per cent, and I am not expecting much of a year-end bonus given the circumstances,” said a civil servant named Timothy Tian in an interview with South China Morning Post about the pay cuts in 2021.
The cuts to civil service subsidies were made to make up for the gap in budget resulting from the ‘tens of millions of yuan’ spent on Covid test kits and related medical equipment. According to one estimate, Covid spending could have run up to $252 billion, or 1.5 per cent of China’s GDP if the regime of daily Covid testing was maintained, the testing strategy was recently dropped in the last tweaking of Beijing’s Covid policy.
Also read: What dominates Chinese chatter on India—economy, cheaper medicine
The downsides
Financial rewards related to becoming a civil servant in Tibet come with the cost of being expelled from the service if seen participating in religious activities. In 2014, Beijing published a trial implementation (like a draft policy document which is supposed to send a message to the civil servants) of the provisions to punish civil servants who engage in religious and political activities.
“Organising and using religious activities to oppose the party’s line, guidelines, and policies, inciting riots, and undermining national unity and national unity,” says a section of the provision.
Article 6 of the said guidelines specifically limits keeping contact with the 14th Dalai Lama. Individuals who attend ‘pujas’ organised by the 14th Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration will be punished. Even the children of the civil servants can’t be seen keeping contact with the Dalai Lama or his affiliates.
As the economic conditions of some sections of Tibetan youth have improved relatively, the pursuit of stable jobs has made civil services and the military an attractive option.
Tibetans aspiring to become civil servants doesn’t mean that Beijing has become a merit-driven society where the local Tibetan bureaucrats get the same treatment as bureaucrats from the Chinese mainland.
Moreover, Xi’s selection of allies for the 20th Party Congress and side-lining of the Communist Youth League faction only indicates that the odds are against Tibetan-origin bureaucrats rising in the hierarchy of Chinese bureaucracy.
The Tibetan youth’s interest in pursuing civil services reveals the failure of government policy to create enough private enterprises that can generate local jobs. Hence, the internal stability of Tibet is propped up by large government spending and youth dissatisfaction – as elsewhere in the Chinese mainland. This may pose new challenges for Beijing in the future.
The author is a columnist and a freelance journalist. He was previously a China media journalist at the BBC World Service. He is currently a MOFA Taiwan Fellow based in Taipei and tweets @aadilbrar. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)