Fir RECORD｜Civil service can’t save the “disappointed” middle-aged

The Final Gamble

This article was first published on Toutiao, please do not reprint

Text and photos by Dong Sheng

Editor: Shirley Wang

The time given to this generation of middle-aged people has been extended by three years.

On January 14, the results of the 2026 National Civil Servant Examination were released. Before the numbers that would determine their fate jumped out, 38-year-old Zhang Qi decided to buy a little more chance of winning with money. At half past six in the evening, he followed the flow of people leaving work to the side of the street, unlocked a shared bicycle, and rode towards a civil service training institution in the city center. He was going to take a one-on-one interview class, which cost 700 yuan per hour. He had already prepaid 11,000 yuan in tuition fees – this amount was equivalent to his two months’ base salary, enough to pay three months’ mortgage.

More than a month ago, Zhang Qi had just walked out of the examination hall. At that time, his appearance seemed abrupt among a group of faces full of collagen. That day, he was wearing a neat and tidy shirt, and the gray hair at his temples was a bit eye-catching. He tried hard to find in the crowd, and only occasionally could he find a few candidates of his age.

Compared to the ease and naturalness of young people, they seemed particularly constrained.

“Young people can wait until the written exam results come out before preparing for the interview. At my age, I can’t afford to waste time.” Sitting in the corner of the training classroom, Zhang Qi filled his notebook with a framework for answering questions.

This was once a door that had been welded shut for 30 years. Since 1994, “35 years old” has been like an invisible barrier, blocking countless middle-aged people outside the red line of the system. But on October 14, 2025, the official website of the State Civil Service Administration issued an announcement, extending the upper age limit for applying for the 2026 central government agencies and their directly affiliated institutions recruitment examination to 38 years old, and for graduate students and doctoral students, it was extended to 43 years old.

This sudden crack allowed middle-aged people like Zhang Qi to see an opportunity.

Zhang Qi was not alone. Behind him, there were a large number of older candidates who wanted to “go ashore” – Zhao Tianle, who had been drifting in the hospital laboratory for 13 years, wanted to take off the “temporary worker” skin before the age of 38; Wu Yang, who was burdened with a monthly mortgage of 20,000 yuan, was running into walls after leaving a big factory; Zhu Lin, who had lost his business, was convinced that “going ashore” was the only way out; and Yuan Li, who was trying to squeeze from the edge of private schools and family rights towards the center.

In front of the narrow gate of 98:1, this admission ticket became their last gamble for dignity and survival.

Take off that “temporary” skin

In the training class classroom, Zhang Qi is used to practicing interview questions in front of the mirror. His eyes are firm, and his voice is loud.

Such repeated practice had also been done before – before the age of 35, he had twice attempted the civil service examination, but both times he failed. After his 35th birthday, he gave up completely and stuffed the textbooks into the corner, firmly believing that he would have nothing to do with the “system” for the rest of his life.

During his more than ten years of work, Zhang Qi had been a bidding agent and also done environmental impact assessment, but neither lasted long – sometimes the company went bankrupt, sometimes he was optimized, and sometimes he left on his own because of disagreements with the boss.

His most recent job was running market expansion for a communications equipment company owned by a relative. In the entire department, Zhang Qi was the oldest employee, and those colleagues who were at least 5 years younger than him could drink more at the dinner table and work longer hours at their workstations. Even if the company didn’t have a layoff plan for the time being, Zhang Qi began to feel uneasy as he watched the outstanding accounts not being collected for several years: if the company went bankrupt, where could he go at his age?

Among his university classmates, a few had passed the civil service examination early. Their ranks were not high, but their lives were stable, and they always showed a kind of composure that was “well protected” by the system during gatherings. The older he got, the more Zhang Qi envied that kind of “very comfortable and stable” state. He wanted to be that kind of person.

After learning that the upper age limit for the national examination had been relaxed, he decided to seize the last chance. To this end, he formulated a detailed review plan for himself: get up at 5:30 every morning to do practice questions, spend two hours after work to sort out knowledge points, and spend the whole day in the library on weekends to tackle the problems.

In front of the 11,000 yuan interview training fee, he did not hesitate at all. He admitted that he was holding a certain fantasy, “As long as I go ashore, I don’t need to live a life of anxiety anymore”.

Civil service exam training teacher.

This longing for “identity” was extended to 13 years in Zhao Tianle’s case.

Zhao Tianle is also 38 years old, with a slightly plump figure, wearing rimless glasses, and is used to dressing himself in a dark-colored administrative coat, looking more like someone within the system than anyone else – to some extent, this appearance is a projection of his inner self. He seems to be eager to get into that system, and has even trimmed his shape in advance.

After graduating from the biological sciences major in 2009, Zhao Tianle, under his father’s coercion, entered the civil service examination hall for the first time.

At that time, he didn’t have much concept of “within the system”, and he was more inclined to the research and development positions of pharmaceutical companies. “I was young at the time, and I thought taking the civil service exam was just to complete my parents’ task.” Many years later, he still remembers that era of youthful arrogance but with dreams.

That civil service exam naturally ended in failure, but Zhao Tianle also failed to enter the pharmaceutical industry as he wished. His father used all his connections to arrange him into the laboratory of a top-tier hospital in his hometown. Behind the promise of “official work” was a three-party dispatch contract – his labor relationship belonged to a human resources company, and the hospital was only the “employer”.

This meant that he became a temporary worker with an awkward status in this hospital.

Every morning at 7:30, Zhao Tianle put on his white coat on time and swiped his card to enter the laboratory. The work was monotonous and repetitive: preparing reagents, feeding mice, and recording experimental data. His monthly income was fixed at a few thousand yuan. The hospital’s year-end benefits, professional title promotion, and housing subsidies, all the benefits that could reflect his “official status”, had nothing to do with him.

There were also some odd jobs in his daily routine – picking up express deliveries, organizing documents, and even helping official employees pick up and drop off their children. As long as someone asked, he rarely refused. “After all, I’m a dispatched employee, and I can’t stand up straight.” When the hospital needed to gather people for activities, he and other dispatched employees were always the first to be notified, wearing uniform clothes and sitting in the audience.

This “outside the system” humility always reached its peak at family gatherings.

When he first got married, his father-in-law’s family was quite polite to him because of his identity as “working in the hospital”. Since his wife’s sister married a township civil servant, everything changed. “The economic conditions of the place where my brother-in-law works are not good, and he is just an ordinary staff member, but every time at dinner, relatives would call him ‘director’ and ‘town mayor’, which was really disgusting.”

What made Zhao Tianle even more embarrassed was that his relatives always said in front of him, “Tianle, you are still young, take the exam again. After you pass the exam, your brother-in-law can help you.”

Zhao Tianle didn’t fail to work hard to “go ashore”. From the age of 25 to 35, he never missed the national examination, provincial examination, and public institution examination, as long as he met the conditions. The cabinet was filled with past exam papers, tutoring materials, and lecture notes from training institutions. “I’ve taken all kinds of training classes, both offline and online, and one-on-one.” He didn’t calculate how much money he spent, “It definitely wouldn’t be less than 100,000 yuan”. But in ten years, he only entered the interview twice, and both times he was eliminated because his comprehensive score did not meet the standard.

An advertisement for a “going ashore” training class.

In order to successfully go ashore, he even considered applying for positions in high-altitude areas, but in the end, he failed to do so because his written exam scores were a few points short.

On his 35th birthday, Zhao Tianle knew that his civil service exam journey had come to an end – according to previous policies, 35 years old was the upper age limit for applying. In 2024, he went to his father-in-law’s house for the New Year. The topic of the civil service exam was brought up again at the dinner table, and Zhao Tianle pretended to be relaxed, “I’m already over the age limit, and I won’t be able to pass the civil service exam in this lifetime.”

His father-in-law listened, said nothing, and just silently picked up a dish. After a while, his brother-in-law came, and the old man immediately stood up and walked forward to shake hands and greet him warmly. Zhao Tianle had never seen him with such a genuine smile.

For middle-aged people like Zhang Qi and Zhao Tianle who are “identity-divided”, the relaxation of the upper age limit for the civil service exam is more like the state giving them a chance to “clear their names” against the backdrop of delayed retirement, giving them hope to tear off the labels of “dispatch”, “temporary employment” or “private enterprise worker”.

The last insurance policy in the narrow gate

If identity recognition is a kind of spiritual redemption, then for Wu Yang and Zhu Lin, taking the civil service exam is more like a refuge. Because before dignity, what is more urgent is to survive.

The data is cold and cruel.

In 2026, the number of applicants for the national civil service examination exceeded 3.718 million, and the ratio of applicants to those admitted reached a record high of 98:1. What made the middle-aged candidates even more desperate was that more than 67% of the positions were still limited to fresh graduates. This means that tens of thousands of older candidates can only compete for the remaining less than 30% of the food.

Compared to young people, older candidates often face greater pressure.

38-year-old Wu Yang once worked in the media and then worked as a public relations officer during the golden age of internet giants. The company once prepared to go public, and the stock option incentives and high salary待遇 made him immersed in the “dream of getting rich”. He took out a loan to buy a large apartment in the city center, changed to a luxury SUV, and was convinced that he would be free from worry about food and clothing from then on.

In 2020, the company’s listing was shelved, and Wu Yang soon became an optimized object because of his lack of core technical advantages. Later, he entered another internet company, but in the end, he couldn’t escape the fate of being laid off at the age of 35.

After that, he became a “wanderer” in the workplace – he moved from one small company to another, worked as a new media operator, and tried brand planning, but no job lasted long. He wanted to return to traditional media, but found that the industry had changed, and his experience was already outdated.

“The media needs young people who can stay up late and chase hot topics. At my age, I can’t even handle the shift work.” Wu Yang was a little frustrated. The mortgage of more than 20,000 yuan per month, the children’s tuition fees, and the daily expenses of the family made him breathless. He had considered selling the house to ease the pressure, but the falling housing prices at the moment made him hesitate to make a decision.

When he was almost desperate, the news of the relaxation of the age limit for the civil service exam came.

Wu Yang planned to give it a try, “I used to think that taking the civil service exam was something those people without ideals did. Now I find that stability is the most luxurious privilege in this era.”

It was only in 2025 that Zhu Lin realized the importance of stability.

He was once a “serial entrepreneur”. When he was in college, he firmly believed in the creed that “making money in the system is too little, and if you have the ability, do business”. In the first few years after graduation, he and his classmates jointly traded medical devices and earned their first pot of gold. Then, he opened a wedding company, but due to fierce competition in the industry and poor management, it closed down in less than two years. After that, he followed the trend and did education and training, caught up with the implementation of the “double reduction” policy; he opened a coffee shop and a tea shop, and did second-hand car business. After more than ten years of tossing, he suffered consecutive failures.

He finally understood: the upper limit of individual effort often cannot withstand the fluctuations of the environment.

The family’s financial situation has been up and down for more than ten years. Once, his child was hospitalized, and he didn’t even have enough cash to pay for the hospitalization, and he had to borrow money from both parents.

In 2025, at the persuasion of his wife, 36-year-old Zhu Lin decided to apply for the national civil service examination. But when he picked up the textbooks for the administrative test and the essay test, he was completely dumbfounded. “For so many years, except for reading some success books, I have hardly read any books seriously.” He tried to sit down and study, forcing himself to study for four hours every day. But he couldn’t sit still for half an hour, and his mind was full of business matters.

In this line of study, he said that he was like an elementary school student, and he had to relearn how to survive.

Civil service exam students in training.

This extreme craving for “certainty” also penetrated into the internal power game of the family.

Yuan Li works in administration at a private college, earning a salary of seven or eight thousand yuan per month. In the eyes of outsiders, her life is already stable – her husband is a tenured teacher at a public college, her daughter is in junior high school, and the family is harmonious. But only Yuan Li knows that the “private” identity label is like a small thorn that always pricks her unintentionally.

“How busy can a private school be? If the worst comes to the worst, just quit” – whenever there is something to take care of at home, and both husband and wife have to work overtime, her husband would always say that. Yuan Li realized that as long as she didn’t enter the system for a day, she would always be the supporting role in the family’s discourse system who could be sacrificed at any time.

In October 2025, the news of the relaxation of the age limit for the national civil service examination came. Yuan Li, who was born in December 1987, happened to be on the edge of this relaxation. “If you pass the exam, you can go to Beijing and work in the ministries and commissions.” Her husband’s soft grinding and hard bubble, coupled with her long-term longing for “going ashore”, she finally filled in her personal information in the application system, and then searched through the recruitment position table for a long time. In the end, she could only apply for a few positions in the county-level institutions directly under the central government located in remote and impoverished areas – these positions were more than 1,000 kilometers away from home, and far from her husband’s expectation of “Beijing ministries and commissions”.

After much hesitation, Yuan Li still checked the application box, “At least there is something to apply for, which is better than nothing”.

Racing against time and forgetting

Middle-aged candidates, it is a “slaughter” of energy and memory.

Since applying, Yuan Li has used all her fragmented time for exam preparation. When she was working at school, she hid wireless earphones in her hair and listened to the lessons while sorting out documents and printing materials; during the lunch break, while her colleagues were resting on their desks, she took out her phone to brush the administrative test questions; when she went to the toilet and went to the supermarket to buy groceries, the earphones also played the essay writing skills and current affairs hot spot interpretations repeatedly. Her canvas bag always contained textbooks and notebooks, ready to seize even ten minutes of study time.

However, the biological decline cannot be completely covered by willpower.

Staring at the data analysis formula “base period quantity = current period quantity ÷ (1 + growth rate)” in the administrative test, Yuan Li kept repeating it in her mouth, as if reciting some ancient spell. After finally memorizing this string of characters, it was only 20 minutes later, and she had forgotten everything. The wrong question book was densely filled with red pen marks, and she didn’t know how many times she had fallen on the same type of formula questions.

This kind of discontinuous memory loss is especially cruel when reciting essays. She once spent an afternoon memorizing the specific connotations of “rural comprehensive revitalization”, and she was still chanting it in her mind when she was cooking dinner, but when she brushed the questions the next morning, she only remembered some content of industrial revitalization and cultural revitalization, and the rest of the ecology, organization, and talent were completely forgotten.

In order to fight against aging, she learned from the “student party” and bought DHA capsules and walnut powder, taking them on time every day. The capsules had a fishy smell that made her feel sick, and she made cup after cup of walnut powder, but the fog in her mind never dissipated. “It wasn’t so difficult to memorize classical Chinese back then,” Yuan Li felt frustrated, “Now even a simple formula requires several times the energy”.

A civil service exam student is practicing writing an essay.

“Lack of ability” is a common predicament for older candidates. On social platforms, some people said that they couldn’t concentrate for five minutes, “thinking about where to meet clients tomorrow, and thinking about what to cook for the children” at one moment; some people said that after brushing questions continuously for four hours, their eyes would have double images, and their lumbar vertebrae would also ache. In order to stay awake, they could only apply cool oil on their noses and step on acupressure boards under their feet. This almost self-abusive persistence is the only thing they can control after being marginalized in the workplace.

Although he has taken the civil service examination several times, Zhao Tianle said that because he hadn’t studied systematically in the two years after the age of 35, many knowledge points had become unfamiliar. Coupled with his busy work, he could only use fragmented time to review intensively. On the desk at home, there were densely packed sticky notes, with key formulas and high-frequency test points written on them, and even the phone wallpaper used the words “going ashore”.

“Studying is more difficult than before now, my eyes get tired quickly, and my memory is also not good. I have to think about a question repeatedly before I can understand it.” Sometimes he works overtime until late at night, and when he gets home, he wants to brush a few more questions, but he always falls asleep while watching.

37-year-old Lv Wei is experiencing another dimension of wear and tear.

Every morning at 5:30, she gets up on time. In addition to preparing for the exam, she also has to maintain the operation of the entire family: washing clothes, cooking, and picking up and dropping off children. As a former accounting backbone of the company, Lv Wei was once full of confidence in her logical thinking. Now, she has to react for a long time even to the most basic permutation and combination formulas. In order to regain her feel, she specially bought elementary school math problems to practice calculations, but found that it often took three readings to understand a question.

She has tried various scientific memory methods, but these methods all failed in the face of trivial housework. Once, in order to remember the “sum of series formula”, she spent three nights and wrote the derivation process of the formula more than a dozen times. But when it came to the mock exam, she still lost points because she couldn’t remember the formula.

The more invisible consumption comes from within the family. In the past two years, her husband’s company’s operating conditions have taken a turn for the worse, with a sharp decline in orders and a tight cash flow, and there is a risk of bankruptcy at any time. Lv Wei, who has been a housewife for many years, therefore hopes to pass the civil service exam to build a last line of defense for the family. Her husband also expressed his full support, and even sighed, “I was too selfish before, and let you lose your career. Now I support you to live for yourself once”.

But the support only stayed on the surface. He never shared the cooking, washing clothes, and taking care of the children.

As soon as the national examination ended, Lv Wei immediately prepared for the provincial examination. This may be her last chance to legally change her fate through the “examination”. There will be no “revival match” on the road ahead.

Waiting for “sentencing”

At 5 p.m. on November 30, 2025, the essay exam ended.

Yuan Li walked out of the examination hall. She wrapped her red coat tightly – this was the “lucky outfit” she had specially chosen. “Not so good, I don’t feel hopeful.” She told her husband who was waiting on the side of the road. The latter frowned: “Why do you always say unlucky things, you have to think positively.” Yuan Li didn’t have the energy to argue, she just wanted to go home and rest as soon as possible, after all, she had to go to work on time the next day.

In fact, for older candidates, even if they have crossed the mountains of the written exam and the interview, the future is still unknown. The most difficult hurdle is the physical examination.

Zhang Qi opened the physical examination item list and compared them one by one. Blood pressure, blood sugar, and blood lipids are hard indicators, and if any one of them exceeds the standard, they may be directly eliminated. In addition, indicators such as liver function, kidney function, electrocardiogram, and abdominal B-ultrasound are also very strict.

And these are precisely the places where middle-aged people are most likely to “fall”.

During this period of preparing for the exam, Zhang Qi and Zhao Tianle’s schedules were completely disrupted. Sleeping at 2 a.m. and getting up at 6 a.m. was the norm. What supported them to get through it was strong tea, coffee, and high-oil and high-salt takeout. Wu Yang was also the same. A year of exam preparation made him almost stop all exercise. His weight increased by twenty pounds compared to three years ago, his abdomen quietly bulged, and he was panting when climbing three flights of stairs.

The civil service exam training class at nearly 11 p.m.

A while ago, Wu Yang’s blood pressure was already at the critical value during the company’s physical examination. The doctor urged him to eat a light diet and have a regular schedule, but the urgency of preparing for the exam made him have no time to adjust. He privately measured it with a home blood pressure monitor, and several times his systolic blood pressure exceeded 140mmHg.

“If I pass the written exam and the interview, and finally fail the physical examination, I will really be finished for the rest of my life.” Wu Yang said.

In addition to the physical examination, the system’s examination of people is also becoming more and more three-dimensional.

On December 25, the news that “Shandong will investigate the motivation for applying for civil servants” topped the hot search on Weibo. According to reports, Shandong will “deeply explore the motivation for the candidates to apply”, “comprehensively grasp the performance of the candidates ‘inside and outside 8 hours'”, and “verify the online social platform remarks of key personnel”. For middle-aged people with complex resumes like Zhang Qi and Wu Yang, their “motivation for applying” is often full of calculations for survival. Compared to fresh graduates with a blank sheet of paper, their interpersonal interactions in the enterprise, their remarks after drinking, and even every job change in the workplace may become flaws under the magnifying glass of political review.

And these adjustments reflect the fact that the recruitment of civil servants is turning to a more in-depth comprehensive review.

Wang Tianyu, a researcher at the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and deputy director of the Social Law Office, said in an interview with Legal Daily that the recruitment of national civil servants has a guiding role. The adjustment of the age limit for applying is a response to the current situation of the labor population against the background of aging in our country, and it is also the implementation of the country’s major decision-making deployment. At the same time, it reflects the trend of the focus of civil servant examination shifting towards ability orientation.

In his opinion, this guiding role is reflected in the selection and employment of people throughout society. The adjustment of the age limit for applying has a positive demonstration effect on society, which is conducive to changing the “35-year-old threshold” rule in the job market.

In recent years, the legal community has also been calling for age discrimination to be clearly defined as employment discrimination, but before the relevant regulations are improved, this generation of older candidates is more like a kind of “pioneer trial” of a certain system transformation: they have enjoyed the dividends of policy relaxation, and at the same time, they must accept a more stringent review.

In January, as the time for the results to be announced approached. On social media, fresh graduates were repeatedly refreshing the page, anxiously “going ashore” in the comment area. Zhang Qi and others generally showed a kind of sluggishness belonging to middle-aged people – they only vaguely remembered that the results would be released in January, but no one was watching the phone to refresh, and they rarely participated in similar discussions.

On the evening of the 14th, the results were announced. Zhang Qi, Yuan Li, and Zhao Tianle, none of their names appeared on the list of shortlisted candidates.

Life doesn’t seem to have changed much because of an exam. Zhang Qi continued to go back to the company to urge those bad debts that couldn’t be collected, and Yuan Li still worked in the familiar administrative position.

Zhao Tianle was completely relieved. He wore that dark-colored administrative jacket and changed medicine and prepared reagents for the mice in the laboratory every day.

“I can be considered to have fought for my obsession again.”

After saying this, he turned around again, lowered his head, and continued to record the series of boring experimental indicators.

(Some of the characters in the article are pseudonyms at the request of the interviewees)

Operation / Huang Xinyue Proofreading / Li Xiangling Art Design / uncle Mary

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