There are an awful lot of obnoxious and abusive bosses in China. Encouragingly, however, more and more employees are refusing to take it anymore and are blowing the whistle on their boss’ excesses.
Employees like Mr Chen, a professional photographer working in a provincial government office, who got so feed up with having to do homework assignments for his boss’ 12-year-old daughter that he called his local newspaper the Qianjiang Evening News and told them all about it.
Employees at this particular office were routinely told by the boss to help with his daughter’s maths homework and other school assignments but the final straw, Mr Chen said, came over the Spring Festival when a total of nine members of staff were ordered to provide essays, photographs and video for a winter-break assignment on how her hometown had changed over the years. It took them three days and two nights to complete the assignment to the daughter’s exacting standards. Mr Chen’s photographs, for example, were supposed to be “not too professional” so that it would look like a 12-year-old took them.
Civil service jobs are lucrative and highly sought-after in China and, as such, officials often think they can get away with such ridiculous demands because their employees would not dare complain. But that is clearly not the case anymore. Both existing employees and job applicants are increasingly complaining about government officials’ abuse of power.
Last November, ten women staged a highly visible protest outside government offices in the central city of Wuhan after being told they would have to submit to invasive gynaecological examinations before being offered a job in the civil service. The protest got national and international headlines and highlighted the widespread problem of gender discrimination in the workplace.
Another common practice, that of “carrot recruitment” (萝卜招聘) has also come under fire from irate staffers and job applicants. Carrot recruitment occurs when government officials rig job applications by digging holes tailor-made for their favoured “carrot” (usually their own son or daughter) that will guarantee them the job. For example, the requirements for a job at the Pingnan county toll fee office in Fujian were so demanding that only the daughter of vice-mayor met all the criteria. Indeed, she was the only one who applied for the job.
And on the subject of government officials behaving badly: This video of a member of a county-level people’s political consultative conference official smashing up the desk at an airport departure gate after he missed his flight prompted several thousand comments on Youku, very few of them complimentary.