China has the longest history of recruiting government officials through an open examination system in the world, which can be traced back to the early 7th century, the Sui Dynasty initiating such a system. Instead of Mainland China under the communist rule,2 it is Taiwan which succeeds the system with the Nationalist Party transplanting the modern Chinese civil service examination system, whose prototype was formulated during the rule of the Nationalist Government in Nanjing at the end of the 1920s, into the island after the party having been defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the mainland in 1949.
After having settled in the early 1950s, the Nationalist Party reinstalled the civil service system into the island. After a couple of institutional overhauls, the fundamental institution of the existing system was founded in 1987, where the government confirmed adopting the hybrid system coupling the position classification with the rank classification system, as mentioned above. All career civil servants are divided into 14 grades vertically and the 14 grades are grouped into three broad ranks.
Grades 1 to 5 are in the lowest elementary rank; grades 6 to 9 are in the middle junior rank; grades 10 to 14 are in the top senior rank. Horizontally all positions are grouped into 51 classes. Each official position may span across 2 to 3 grades. This structure represents the so-called hybrid classification system. As for the size of the civil servant workforce, it comes to around some 330,000 (see Table 1).
The civil service system in Taiwan is quite unique in the sense that its government personnel administration is separate from the cabinet and its functional
2 The modern civil service system in Communist China was established in 1993, see (Burns, 2001) 7
ministries. Under the unique five-power state system, one of the powers is Examination Power, which is held by the above-mentioned Examination Yuan, which, with its executive branches Ministry of Examination and Ministry of Civil Service, is in charge of the civil service recruitment, government’s personnel policy and administration, and the enactment of civil service laws and regulations. This institutional design implies a succession to the traditional Chinese civil service examination system whose outstanding heritage rested on its centralized, separate and meticulous official recruitment institution.
More importantly, not only all newly appointed civil servants are selected through the centralized national civil examination undertaken by the Examination Yuan, but also the concrete job positions of these freshmen were centrally assigned by the Yuan with reference to the priorities submitted by the freshmen. It means that the functional government agencies, which will be responsible for managing these new entrants, are absent from the selection of new civil servants. No “rule of three” is applied to the recruitment of new civil servants.
However, such a centralized system implies a lengthy recruitment procedure as the general civil service examinations, which aim at the recruitment of various classes and grades of civil servants, were held once a year, even though some “special” civil service examinations, which are tailor-made for particular demands of some government agencies (e.g. police, customs), aborigine- and handicapped-reserved positions, and local governments, were held in different time periods. As a result, those agencies with urgent demand for manpower have to wait for up to one year to meet their need.
More importantly, the centrally assigned civil servants are as such not affiliated with the agencies or even the line administrative function they serve. If a civil servant finds the position assigned is not desirable (usually in terms of geographical location), they can apply for a transfer to another position once a vacancy is available. Due to the frequent turnover of the manpower, especially at the street-level agencies or agencies in remote areas, since 2008 all new entrants recruited through the general civil service examinations have been restricted from transferring to another agency within one year. The above-mentioned special civil service examination is partly aimed to solve the frequent turnover of civil servants. The special examination for local governments, for example, is tailor-made fully for this purpose. Those new entrants through such a particular examination must stay in a fixed local area for at least six years in order to stabilize the workforce of local government agencies.
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The state rather than agency affiliation of civil servants can be further reflected by the status of a civil servant. A civil servant is not simply a job position but also an identity or status endowed by the state upon s/he has passed the civil service examination. The identity is protected by the personnel law concerned. With the identity, a civil servant is qualified for a wide range of positions limited by the class one enters. Some classes allow for a boarder range of positions for civil servants to transfer; some others narrower. Those quit a civil service position can reenter another position in the future with the identity.
There is a comprehensive set of civil service laws to govern the personnel administration. These laws cover the governing of the civil servants’ recruitment, appointment, compensation, appraisal, promotion, transfer, protection, retirement and so on. Under these laws, the civil servants in Taiwan are an unusual class of workers distinct from the “labor” whose rights are governed by the Labor Standards Law. In this context, the relationship between the state and a civil servant is not considered that between an employer and an employee, but an appointer and an appointee, i.e. no contract relationship between the state and civil servants in the legal sense, an analogy with the case in Germany (Röber & Löffler, 2000). As the civil servants are not
“laborers” in the legal sense, the rights they enjoy and the legal burdens they bear are different from other working classes.
Remaining an iron-bowl job, the civil service has been a highly appealing type of jobs for Taiwanese. Every year, there are hundreds of thousands of people taking the civil service examinations. In the past few years, the success rates ranged from 1% at the elementary-level civil examination to 8% at the advanced level. Hence the examination is highly competitive.
Such a centralized and highly competitive civil servant recruitment system, for all its rigidity and inflexibility, has enjoyed a high reputation among people in Taiwan because it has maintained a fair and competing mechanism that is free of patronage and political intervention. The whole examination and selection procedure keeps almost absolute anonymity, not only because a blind marking of examination papers is strictly enforced, but also the written test is the sole way adopted to screen the candidates in most levels of the examinations, no interview or other means of selection which possibly enhance the subjectivity or bias of examiners are adopted.3
3 Only senior level civil service examinations for grade 7 and grade 9 officials include an interview procedure but this type of examinations is not regularly held every year and for those who have a Master’s and a PhD degree respectively.
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Such “procedural fairness,” the convention for centuries in the civil service examination of China, is considered a favorable means to enhance social mobility and to prevent any corrupt practice that seems to inevitably happen in Chinese societies if the “anonymity” is discarded.
By contrast, other types of government staff, which join the ranks of public servants without passing such a competitive selection process, are susceptible to social challenges for questioning their qualification and background. The government contract employee belongs to such a group of staff. This group has been in the personnel system for a long time, but due to their “dishonorable” path to the government positions, they have been “second-class” public servants. In the recent attempt to flexibilize the government personnel, their “dishonorable” status becomes a high obstacle to making use of such a source of workforce.