(TibetanReview.net, Oct26’21) – More than 20,000 people in China have registered to sit for this year’s civil service exam for a postal department position in Tibet’s remote western prefecture of Ngari (Chinese: Ali), making it the most popular post in the country this year, reported China’s official global.chinadaily.com.cn Oct 26. With the region seeing double-digit annual growth in “domestic” tourist-visitors for decades, China has been promoting Tibet as a place to visit as well as to live and work in with apparent unprecedented success.
Some 2.02 million candidates have registered to sit for China’s 2022 national civil servant exam, of whom 1.84 million had passed the preliminary review and qualified to take the exam, the report said.
This means only one out of 59 people will be finally admitted as a civil servant, creating fiercer competition than last year, when one in about 54.5 people was accepted, the report said.
The written exam for the annual civil servant exam will be held on Nov 28, followed by interviews for those who pass it to be held sometime next year. The successful candidates will fill 31,242 posts nationwide.
The report said that no limitations had been set on the applicants’ work experience for about 84% of the posts, with 67% being reserved for students graduating in 2022.
The reason why there has been such a rush of applicants for a position in the postal department in Tibet’s Ali prefecture was stated to be because it was one for which no limitations on the educational backgrounds or work experience of the applicants had been set. But that is only part of the reason, the other being offers of special incentives.
“As a design major, the post office position is the only one I can sign up for,” China’s official globaltimes.cn Oct 22 quoted an unnamed Sina Weibo social media website user as saying.
In contrast, the report said, some posts with strict limitations or those located in distant and backward western regions of the country received a cold shoulder from applicants. Data has shown that 127 posts, or 0.76% of all postings, had no applicants this time, it added.
As regards the real reason why there has been so many applicants for the post in Ali prefecture, Wang Jian, chief tutor at Offcn Education and Technology Co, has said, “To guide young people to work in places where talent is needed, such as grassroots level government organs with backward, difficult working conditions, the country has tried to offer attractive packages.”
Offcn is a private institution that offers training for the exam, the report said.
The once remote eastern Tibetan prefecture of Ngari now brims with colonies of Chinese settlers and major military complexes. China has built new towns, roads, and an airport as it is also a strategic border area facing India’s Union Territory of Ladakh.
