国内英语新闻:Official denies discrimination in civil service recruitment

BEIJING, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) -- A government official on Sunday refuted an accusation that discriminations widely exist in the country's civil service recruitment process.

Nie Shengkui, director of the examination and recruitment department of the State Administration of Civil Service (SACS), said that the recruitment process is always based on the principles of justice and fairness, which has promoted the upward mobility of people from the grassroots.

The ratio of recruited male and female applicants is around 6 to 4 in last year, equal to the ratio of the male and female applicants, and more than 92 percent of the recruited are from the ordinary families in the grassroots, including 29 percent from the rural areas, according to Nie.

Nie's words came after a survey report published earlier last week, accusing the authorities of having discriminatory requirements in civil servants recruitment.

Conducted by the Constitutionalism Research Institute of China University of Political Science and Law, the survey report said that without publicly acknowledging any form of discrimination, many public offices don't hesitate to hide their preferences on age, gender, education and state of health in recruitment.

Nie defended that it is necessary to set some requirements in the recruitment in a bid to guarantee the future civil servants can carry out there duty competently.

"Civil servants recruitment is a process of choosing talents for the government to manage the country, not for promoting employment," said Nie, "so there is nothing to do with employment discriminations."

Chinese college grads are usually enthusiast about finding jobs within government branches, especially at a time when people are trying to secure a stable future amid a troubled global economy.

A total of 970,000 applicants took the general exam of the recruitment on Saturday and Sunday, They will compete for only 18,000 posts in central government departments and their local branches.