In 1988, Cheng Lianchang, who had worked in the Ministry of Aerospace Industry for more than ten years, received a transfer order from the post of deputy minister to the leadership preparatory team of the Ministry of Personnel. The country should officially start the reform of the personnel system, and the establishment of the national civil service system is the top priority of the reform [1] .
Since the 1950s, there have been four main ways for the entry of staff in state organs: the state uniformly assigns college graduates, the state organizes the deployment of retired military personnel, recruits qualified personnel from the society in a planned way, and through "replacement" Recruit personnel from the children of existing cadres in the form of "internal recruitment".
Cheng Lianchang called these methods the old model of "recommendation, handing over a note, introducing, and transferring in". very chaotic". As a result, the people that various departments want to recruit cannot be recruited, and the people who do not want to be forced into it.
Deng Xiaoping called such an entry method "an outdated personnel system" and "we must have the courage to reform."
In May 1988, the National People's Congress Weibo officially approved the establishment of the Ministry of Personnel (in 2008, the Ministry of Personnel was merged with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, referred to as the "Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security"). Cheng Lianchang was appointed as the executive vice minister of the Ministry of Personnel, and concurrently served as the leader of the leading group for the implementation of the national civil service system. In 1989, the national civil service examination system was piloted in six national departments including the National Audit Office, the State Administration of Taxation, the National Bureau of Statistics, the Administration for Industry and Commerce, the Environmental Protection Bureau, and the Building Materials Bureau, as well as in Shenzhen and Harbin. At that time, it was called the "National Staff Recruitment Examination", which was the predecessor of today's National Civil Service Examination. Both the Ministry of Personnel organized the joint recruitment of multiple departments, and each department recruited separately.
For changes like open recruitment, some departments have resisted, and Cheng Lianchang's implementation team felt resistance and needed to be weighed repeatedly. Four years after the pilot program, in August 1993, the State Council promulgated the "Interim Regulations on National Civil Servants", which established that all state administrative agencies from the central to local levels must establish and implement a civil servant system. A year later, the Ministry of Personnel issued the "Interim Regulations on the Recruitment of National Civil Servants", "every entry must be tested" became the principle of recruitment, and the national civil servant examination recruitment system was officially established. This means that in the future, no matter which level of state administrative organ you enter, you will need to take the exam.
