SOE recruitment should be fair and above board

A video clip that was circulated online showing a primary school student saying in a classroom speech that it is his dream to inherit his "family's fortune" by becoming "governor of the Agricultural Development Bank of China", has sparked much debate about nepotism in State-owned enterprises.

The attention given the video prompted the State-owned bank to check its payroll in response to the public querying of the family background of the "ambitious" boy.

On Sunday, the spokesperson of the ADBC branch in Anhui province told the media that the boy's father is a governor of a county-level branch of ADBC in the province, his mother is a deputy executive of a department in a city branch of ADBC in the same province, his grandfather on his father's side is a retired employee of a county-level branch of ADBC in the province, while his grandfather on his mother's side was the governor of a county-level branch of ADBC in the province before his retirement.

The spokesperson stressed that the current employment position of the boy's parents complies with relevant regulatory requirements and ADBC's own nepotism-avoidance regulations.

Yet families that have close connections with SOEs that dominate such lucrative industries as tobacco, banking, telecommunication, energy, electricity, etc, can still help each other's children secure what are referred to as "iron rice bowl" jobs in different places or in industries other than their own.

Although the boy's parents work for the same bank in different places, the family's close and strong connections with the bank that have already stretched two generations mean it should not be difficult for the boy to secure a bank job in the future, extending his family's association with ADBC to the third generation.

Such family connections in the public sector can lead to the forming of large interest groups, spanning different generations, sectors and industries in different places.

This form of interest exchanges between powerful families, particularly at the grassroots level, such as counties and small towns, explains why many young people from families which are not a link in these interest chains complain about the difficulty of finding a "good" job in their hometown.

Although the nepotism-avoidance regulations were introduced to prevent the practice in one department, the regulations have only proved to be a shield for the forming of nepotism chains on a much larger scale. It is time the regulations were amended to give all applicants for an SOE job a fair crack of the whip, whatever their family background.