Mr Steerpike was interested to read over the Christmas break that young people are currently flocking to join China’s civil service, attracted by the job stability it offers compared to the volatile private sector, and seeking to escape the country’s relatively high youth unemployment.
According to the Reuters piece, the civil service is still seen by young people as an ‘iron rice bowl’, or job for life. Readers may be reminded of our own ‘Rolls-Royce’ civil service, where even the most incompetent bureaucrats are shuffled between departments rather than ever fired – the ‘iron hot desk’, perhaps.
But Mr S was struck by one part of the Reuters piece in particular: that despite long-standing calls for Beijing to reduce the size of its ‘bloated’ state sector, the civil service has grown from 6.9 million in 2010 to 8 million today.
Eight million is a large number – roughly the population of London, for example. But China also has a huge population – and the UK’s own civil service has itself grown dramatically over the years. Mr S had to wonder: could it be that on a per capita basis the UK has more civil servants than communist China?
Let’s take China first. Making an estimate of China’s civil service is notoriously difficult, with various national statistics combining different bureaucracies and private and public sector workers. The Communist Party of China doesn’t have form when it comes to government transparency. If we take the Reuters figure at face value though, and combine it with China’s population of 1.42 billion, that works out as 0.56 per cent of the Chinese population working as a civil servant.
Now for the UK. According to the Cabinet Office, there are currently 542,840 civil servants in the UK, doing the job of 510,125 full-time equivalent staff. That headcount has risen steadily since 2016 – ostensibly because of Brexit and the pandemic. Notably the numbers have not fallen since the end of these two events.
Taking into account the UK’s population, we can see that per capita employment has risen so that 0.81 per cent of the UK population now works as a civil servant:
In other words, on a per capita basis it appears that the UK does have more civil servants than communist China.
Good news comrades, it seems that tractor production in the Great State of Britain is set to be up for many more years to come…
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