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China Examinations, Hereditary Transmission of Jobs, and Connections
Beginning in the late 1970s, China's leaders stressed expertise
and education over motivation and ideology and consequently placed
emphasis again on examinations. Competition in the schools was
explicit, and examinations were frequent. A major step in the
competition for desirable jobs was the passage from senior middle
school to college and university, and success was determined by
performance on a nationwide college and university entrance
examination
(see Education Policy
, ch. 4). Examinations also were
used to select applicants for jobs in factories, and even factory
managers had to pass examinations to keep their positions. The
content of these examinations has not been made public, but their
use represents a logical response to the problem of unfair
competition, favoritism, and corruption.
One extreme form of selection by favoritism in the 1980s was
simple hereditary transmission, and this principle, which operated
on a de facto basis in rural work units, seems to have been fairly
widely used in China's industrial sector. From the 1960s to the
1980s, factories and mines in many cases permitted children to
replace their parents in jobs, which simplified recruitment and was
an effective way of encouraging aging workers to retire. The
government forbade this practice in the 1980s, but in some
instances state-run factories and mines, especially those located
in rural or remote areas, used their resources to set up
subsidiaries or sideline enterprises to provide employment for
their workers' children. The leaders of these work units evidently
felt responsible for providing employment to the children of unit
members.
The party and its role in personnel matters, including job
assignments, can be an obstacle to the consistent application of
hiring standards. At the grass-roots level, the party branch's
control of job assignments and promotions is one of the foundations
of its power, and some local party cadres in the mid-1980s
apparently viewed the expanded use of examinations and educational
qualifications as a threat to their power. The party, acting
through local employment commissions, controlled all job
assignments. Party members occupied the most powerful and desirable
positions; the way party members were evaluated and selected for
positions remained obscure. Local party cadres were frequently
suspected by the authorities of using their connections to secure
jobs for their relatives or clients
(see Informal Mechanisms of Exchange
, this ch.).
Data as of July 1987
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