蒸汽飞机可行:华盛顿邮报：在中国，公职仍然带来好处和吹嘘的资本

来源：百度文库编辑：偶看新闻时间：2024/04/30 11:07:58

在中国任公职仍然好处多多

来源：美国《华盛顿邮报》

田兵（音译，Tian Bing）上月拿到硕士学位，在中国新兴的经济中，这位拥有法律和计算机科学学位的毕业生前景炙手可热。然而他已经拒绝了来自一家航空航天公司、一家银行和一家知名外国公司电脑部的聘书。

田兵本周开始了新工作，在国家知识产权局审查专利申请。他还不知道他的薪水是多少，但估计比那家银行出价的一半还少。

中国可能一头冲向资本主义，私人发展无拘束，股市失控，但许多人仍然追逐公职。

数十年来，政府公职一直是中国社会主义经济的骨干。但随着越来越多岗位转向私营领域，年轻人常常在雄心和担心生活没保障之间忐忑不安。他们的父母在国有企业工作一生，习惯于传统工作单位提供的好处。

每一年，随着大学扩招，公务员考试的竞争越来越激烈。

大箱橘子，一瓶瓶食用油，大瓶芬芳的驱虫油，装着钞票的信封，从冬天的盐腌鳕鱼到夏天的青豆，好处真不少。

公职人员生病了，他们有医疗保险。等他们退休了，他们有退休金。

曾经是警官的吴幼明（Wu Youming）表示，“如果你老婆病了，单位会捐款。如果有人得了癌症，整个市里大约两千名警察都会捐助。如果你父母去世，警察会为葬礼提供车子。”

除了物质好处，国有单位在传统上提供感情支持。市民受到鼓舞去报告他们的问题，这样他们的单位领袖可以帮忙解决。雇员被告知要相待如兄弟姐妹，这种团结形式旨在让人们更努力地工作。

吴幼明以前负责交通，因没有开出足够的创收罚款单而降职，然后因为在博客上批评罚款配额制度不公而遭解雇。他承认当丢掉工作的时候犹如突然断奶的婴儿。

公职有吸引力的另一个原因可能是单位对私人生活的控制大为减少。

单位过去控制职员的结婚离婚，但现在不是了。在九十年代国有企业改革的时候，国家对雇员的控制开始放松。

田兵表示，他主要不是被新工作的稳定和福利吸引，他认为这些已经不像过去那么慷慨了。只是这份工作跟他的学术背景很相配。但他承认工作量不十分大，有自己的休闲时间。

但他的工作有一个大好处，可以帮助他获得北京户口。户口意味着住房和教育方面可以省下不少，这是属于单位的另一个难以割舍的福利。（原标题：在中国，公职仍然带来好处和吹嘘的资本；作者：Maureen Fan）

译文为摘译，英文原文：http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801132.html

In China, a State Job Still Brings Benefits And Bragging Rights

By Maureen Fan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 29, 2007; Page A07

BEIJING -- Tian Bing received his master‘s degree last month, which instantly made the law and computer science graduate a hot prospect in China‘s booming economy. Yet he has already rejected job offers from an aerospace company, a bank and the computer division of a prestigious foreign company.

Instead, Tian started a new job this week reviewing patent applications in the state intellectual property office. He doesn‘t know his salary yet but expects it will be less than half what the bank would have paid.


"Lots of people around me say that being a civil servant can have better benefits than private companies," said Tian, 26. "Each time my parents and I talk about jobs, they always ask me to find a government job, because being a civil servant means a safe job, good medical welfare and a good retirement pension."

China may be rushing headlong into capitalism, with unfettered private development and a runaway stock market, but many people here are still chasing after state jobs.

Government work has been the backbone of China‘s socialist economy for decades. But as more jobs shift to the private sector, young people are often torn between ambition and fear of living without a safety net. Their parents spent their entire working lives with state companies and were accustomed to benefits provided by traditional work units, known as danwei.

"Young graduates are fighting each other to get into a state-run work unit, because good jobs are now harder to come by, and schools churn out more and more graduates every year," said Jian Yi, 31, an independent filmmaker who recently left a cushy state job as a university lecturer in English and journalism.

"On the other hand, many ambitious young men think like me -- they are put off by the suffocating environment, the dirty politics within the danwei and the omnipresence of inefficiency, incompetence and corruption typical of a danwei," Jian said.

Since the Communist takeover in 1949, the government has provided cradle-to-grave jobs for much of the Chinese population, with benefits ranging from apartments and subsidized hospital stays to shampoo and toilet paper.

Leaders began dismantling the mostly bankrupt state-owned factory system beginning in the 1990s. The number of state workers dropped from 110 million in 1995 to 62 million two years ago. Today, private companies account for more than half of China‘s gross domestic product.

But many people still lack the courage to "jump into the sea" of private entrepreneurship, as the Chinese saying goes, preferring instead the dependability of lower-paying jobs in schools, police stations, post offices and the civil service.

Each year, as university enrollments rise, the civil service exam that Tian passed grows more competitive; about 540,000 people took the exam in 2005, a roughly 1,600 percent increase over the 32,000 people who took it in 2001, according to state media reports.

A Sheaf of Benefits

When state employees are sick, they have hospital insurance. When they retire, they get a pension.

"If your wife is sick, dozens of other danwei members take up a collection," said Wu Youming, 33, a former police officer. "If someone gets cancer, police across the city will donate -- maybe 2,000 people. If your father or mother dies, the police will provide cars for the funeral."


Wu was demoted for not issuing enough revenue-generating tickets, then fired for criticizing the fairness of a ticket quota system on a blog, he said. He now publishes a literary magazine and has written a novel about his 13 years as a police officer.

"When he worked in the traffic division we never had to buy drinks because our refrigerator was always full of green tea and cola from his danwei," said Wu‘s wife, Zhou Li, 25, who also left her state job as an administrative aide in the art department of a technical university. "They gave us so much we couldn‘t use it all. We had to take things to our parents. I never ran out of bath towels or soap."

In addition to material goods, state-run companies also traditionally provided emotional support. Citizens were encouraged to report their problems so that the leaders of their work units could help. Employees were told to treat each other like brothers and sisters, a form of solidarity aimed at enabling people to work harder.

"If your spouse was laid off, the danwei would organize people to visit you over the holidays," Wu said. "If your children couldn‘t find jobs, the danwei would help find temporary jobs for them." The police station had scores of drivers, typists, secretaries, cooks and clerks.

"It was like a family," said Zhou, who majored in Chinese painting at university and is now trying to make a living selling her work to galleries.

Wu admits to "crying hard" when he lost his job. "I had been working for them for so many years that when I suddenly took off the uniform, I felt like a baby suddenly being deprived of milk."

Now that he and his wife no longer belong to work units, most of their friends and family simply consider them unemployed. Chinese, Wu said, see an individual‘s power as limited, whereas with a danwei, a group of people can offer you support.

But Jian, the former university lecturer, said that relying on that potentially valuable and stable social network is pointless.

"There are many unhealthy things about a danwei -- it gives people a distorted, larger-than-life sense of security, and it nourishes inertia," he said. It creates homogeneity and obedience and murders diversity and individuality."

Shrinking Influence

The danwei used to control its workers‘ marriages and divorces, but no longer. Employees no longer have to seek approval for hotel reservations and airline tickets, so bosses no longer determine who is allowed to travel. Wu‘s danwei used to vet the girlfriends and boyfriends of police officers, to ensure they were not consorting with troublemakers.

State control over employees began loosening in the 1990s, when the reform of state-owned enterprises began, said Li Lulu, a sociology professor at Renmin University of China.


"Before, workers and their bosses were forcibly bound together," he said. "After graduation, all your files and documents were kept by the danwei. You couldn‘t go to another job or get your papers without your leader‘s approval."

Tian, the recent graduate, said he was not primarily swayed by the stability and benefits of his new state job, which he described as less generous than in the past. The position was simply a good match with his academic background, he insisted.

Still, he acknowledged, "the workload is not very heavy. I can have my own leisure time."

But a big advantage of his state job is that it will help the Liaoning province native obtain a prized Beijing residency permit. Residency means significant discounts for housing and education and is yet another hard-to-let-go-of benefit of belonging to a work unit.

Some experts argue that the power of the state-run work unit is declining because there are so many other avenues to wealth. But as the government gets out of the business of managing some of its workers, danwei leaders still wield control over important things such as real estate.

Two decades ago, government departments managed apartment construction. But in recent years, danwei leaders have been in charge of obtaining apartments from the government and then selling them at hugely discounted rates to their workers.

In Huangshi, the city in Hubei province where Wu worked, no more than 100 police officers out of nearly 2,000 lacked apartments, Wu said. The traffic police division, which brought in the most revenue, had the means to build its own apartments. The largest were as big as 1,500 square feet, with three or four bedrooms. Some downtown apartments were worth hundreds of thousands of yuan but were sold to police officers for only 10,000 yuan (about $1,300), Wu said.

Tian is not sure whether the intellectual property office will give him an apartment, but he knows he already has prestige.

"I attended a gathering of high school friends recently and one classmate patted my shoulder and said, ‘Oh you are now really a cut above all of us, since you are a civil servant with the state government,‘ " Tian said.

And when he went home for the national May holiday, his mother took him for a walk so she could brag to each of her neighbors, one by one, that her son was a civil servant.

Researcher Li Jie contributed to this report.

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