Low pay and party loyalty: would Hongkongers want to be civil servants in mainland China?
- Government workers across the border express mixed views on whether city’s residents would do well in their posts
- Beijing has offered such opportunities as part of bay area plan
On the one hand, she hopes young people from Hong Kong will come and help to bring about change in a bureaucracy where political loyalty is prized above all other qualities in an employee.
On the other hand, having been a civil servant for five years, she cannot bring herself to encourage friends in Hong Kong to join her in working on the mainland.
“The environment here is like boiling a frog in water,” she says, suggesting that being a civil servant on the mainland is like dying slowly from performing the most mundane tasks.
Lin, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym to avoid official scrutiny for expressing her views, says her work day is filled with trivial tasks and endless paperwork. There is little that is challenging or makes use of the training she received in a Guangzhou university.
She sometimes feels that the longer she remains a civil servant the more she is losing some of the qualities most valued in the private sector, such as efficiency or showing initiative. Instead, she finds it hard to know her worth in a system where promotion depends mostly on pleasing superiors.