PLA reaps benefits as weak job market brings flood of recruits
After years struggling to recruit top talent, the People's Liberation Army stands to gain from a gloomy job market by welcoming a huge influx of university graduates to its ranks.
Quoting statistics from the Ministry of Education and the PLA's General Staff Headquarters, an army department in charge of recruitment, Xinhua reported that the PLA had signed up a record 120,000 fresh graduates this year.
The world's largest fighting force, with 2.3 million personnel, has had a hard time recruiting enough young talent to turn it into a knowledge-based, hi-tech army. Now thanks to a weak job market in the wake of the global crisis, jobless graduates are lining up to join the force, which promises stable jobs and career opportunities.
As a result of a rapid expansion of mainland universities in the late 1990s, a record 6.1 million college students graduated this year on top of 1 million jobless graduates from the previous year, according to official statistics. Statistics from the Ministry of Human Resources and Labour showed that 45 per cent of fresh graduates had a job by the end of May.
In the same month, the PLA and the Ministry of Education launched the recruitment plan.
Xiong Bingqi, a professor with Shanghai Jiaotong University, said job creation was one of the main aims in the plan.
'It also means a large pool of college graduate recruits boosts the overall quality of army personnel,' Xiong said.
The PLA witnessed three waves of recruitment of intellectuals and college students in its 82-year history - in the 1930s, after the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, and in the 1980s. But overall it has been unable to shake its reputation as an unskilled, peasant army. The number of graduates recruited this year was 60 times the number in 2001.
Professor Gong Fangbin, a proponent of graduate recruitment from the National Defence University, noted that the transformation of university from a place for the privileged elite to somewhere more widely accessible presented an opportunity for the army, Xinhua reported.
'Even more important, the mass recruitment will cultivate a sense of responsibility among the general public and university students will also have a duty to safeguard national interests and shoulder the responsibility of national defence.'
To woo more college graduates, the central government promised to give students a tuition refund of up to 6,000 yuan a year and other preferential policies such as fast-track promotion within the army's complex rank structure.
Wei Zhen, who manages Beijing Polytechnic College's career centre, said the package was attractive during a tough time in the job market, but some technicalities had hampered enthusiasm.
She said while students graduated in July, they had to wait until December before army recruitment opened and they could find out if they were qualified.
'Some students might be put off signing up because of the uncertainty, while others may get better offers before recruitment opened,' Wei said.
Wei explained that the 120,000 college students who signed up might have received some sort of assurance from the army, but they still had to wait until December to actually join.
Only eight students from Wei's college signed up, but she hoped the government could overhaul the scheme to open the recruitment six months before students graduated instead of six months after.
