In his New Year's Day address, President Ma Ying-jeou called on every civil servant to act like the Bodhisattva Guanyin and hear the cries of the world. Examination Yuan president Kuan Chung went further, appealing to civil servants to lose their attitude of being "employed for life." He also announced that within a year the law on civil service performance evaluations would be revised to allow the firing of those not fulfilling their duties. Kuan admits that performance evaluations currently put form before substance and there is a "huge gap" between evaluation results and most people's estimations of the civil service system.

The system of incentives and punishments needs to be improved. Reforming the examination system is also an important strategy in raising the quality of the civil service.

According to Thomas C. P. Peng, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of European and American Studies who specializes in domestic and foreign civil service exams, Taiwan's civil service examination system has always stressed the appearance of fairness, with specialized subject exams and a format emphasizing rote memorization. "It's the least effective of all examination methods, but is rarely criticized," he says. Also, relying only on written exams, it takes no account of whether an individual's personality or abilities fit the profession. "In the future there will be even more wasted human resource capital," he sighs. "This is another reason it has been so hard to boost morale in the public sector!"

Minister of Examination Yung Chaur-shin, who had years of administrative experience in government education and in research, development, and evaluation agencies before taking office last year, admits, "In the current examination system there are many places where the methods and the theory don't match." Yung explains that civil service recruitment in advanced nations is placing more and more emphasis on "soft power" over "hard power." The former refers to work attitude, interpersonal skills, constructive thinking, and the like, while the latter refers to specific abilities. Since specific abilities can be learned at any time through training, they are just the tip of the iceberg while soft power is its base. An examination method developed from this point of view would naturally be more complete and multifaceted.

But in reforming the national civil service and professional licensing exams, "there needs to be a balance between theory and practice, a gradual evolution, and a continuing dialog with all of society to reach a consensus," says Yung. More concretely, to facilitate the current government restructuring program, starting on a trial basis with the 2010 police exam the Ministry of Examination will put into place diversified, multi-stage examinations. Besides the written test, there will be a second stage comprising an interview, a psychological test, and a physical aptitude test, and the on-the-job training period will be extended. Other reforms include: building a database of past and potential questions for professional and technical exams in every field and making the exams into accreditation exams worthy of the name; revising the elegibility conditions for the first-level civil service exam and the levels of starting positions so as to attract high-caliber talent; actively cooperating with universities to find manpower for setting and marking the exams; and continuing the drive to computerize the examination system.

When individuals work hard to secure steady careers, it is to be hoped that the national exam system can also be reformed and can lead society into a future of innovation and good governance.

China's imperial examination system was in place for 1,300 years. Though it once promoted social mobility by allowing commoners to enter officialdom, in the end it became formalistic and even put intellectuals in a backward mentality that passing the exam became a priority above mastering the knowledge. Pictured is a scene from Song-Dynasty examinations.