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.