Drives to cut civil service numbers have led to an increase in the average age of bureaucrats at regional government level, a study has found.
Joint research by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Peking University traced the effectiveness of civil service reforms in the 1990s by evaluating the quality of officials in the education and environmental protection bureaus in Ningbo, in Zhejiang province; Changchun, in Jilin province; and the Haidian district in Beijing from 1998 to this year.
Professor John Burns, of HKU's Department of Politics and Public Administration, said researchers who took part in the project were surprised by the preliminary findings that the bureaus they studied had, on average, older workers as a result of the two staff-cut campaigns in 1993 and 1998.
Over the past decade, there was large-scale recruitment of civil servants only during 1996 and 1997, starting three years after the 1993 downsizing.
Professor Burns said the 1998 civil service reform initiated by Premier Zhu Rongji had stopped the bureaus recruiting. However, only those who were close to retirement age, and newcomers, were axed. As a result, no staff had been recruited since the reforms and the number of officials aged in their 40s and 50s had increased proportionately, while the number under 35 had dropped significantly.
'In the 1990s, educational levels in many bureaus did not increase' and the average age of civil servants was higher, he said.
Professor Burns said: 'I don't know how widespread it is [among other bureaus], we were surprised by these results.'
