The Paths Open After Eighteen

The age and education thresholds of these twelve paths are all written explicitly in documents. To work, you must be at least 16. For military service, it is men who have reached 18, and for bachelor's-degree graduates the age can be extended to 24. For the civil service exam you must be 18 to 35 and have a junior-college (dazhuan) education or above. Two paths, the higher education self-study examinations (自考) and registering as an individual business (个体户), look at neither education nor age.

Military service registration is a legal obligation, not signing up to enlist, and registering does not mean you have to go. Men who turn 18 that year must finish registering online by October 31. If you don't register, the county will order you to correct this within a deadline, and if you still don't, it will compel you to perform your military service obligation and fine you. If you actually join, active service for a conscript is two years.

If you sign up and then refuse to go, the consequences come as a whole string. You cannot be hired as a civil servant, and state-owned enterprises and public institutions cannot recruit you either. For two years you may not leave the country, may not go on to further study, and may not return to school to resume your studies. You will also be put on the list of entities with serious dishonesty in fulfilling national defense obligations. So “sign up first and see; if it doesn't work out, back out” is a very expensive idea.

If you join the military as a current student, a fresh graduate or a new student, the state pays your tuition for the years you study, compensated according to what you actually paid: up to 20000 yuan a year for undergraduate and junior-college students, and up to 25000 yuan for graduate students. If your tuition was low to begin with, only the amount you actually paid is covered. Your student status is kept for two years. For graduate entrance exams there is also a dedicated plan that recruits only discharged college-student soldiers.

“Join the military and get a guaranteed job assignment” has long since stopped being the general case. Now the government assigns work in only six situations, and the vast majority of conscripts discharged after two years of service are not in any of the six. The tier in which the government does not assign work is called self-arranged employment (自主就业), and it has a hard deadline: you must report within 30 days after leaving active service. If you go past 30 days without a legitimate reason, you are deemed to have given up your resettlement benefits.

After discharge there are three accounts. The first is the one-time retirement payment for self-arranged employment, paid according to your years of active service, with an increase if you received merits. The second is that your years in the military don't count as a gap in social insurance: years of military service count as years of work, and contribution years are added together with those before enlistment and after discharge. The third is tax: if you open a shop or do business yourself, you can pay up to 20000 yuan less tax a year for 3 years.

If you want to get into the state system, the civil service exam is not the only way. If you complete two years in a grassroots service program such as “Three Supports and One Assistance” (三支一扶) and pass the assessment, you can apply for a targeted recruitment plan open only to these people. Each province must set aside about 10% of its civil service recruitment plan each year to recruit them. If you take the graduate entrance exam within three years, you also get 10 points added to your preliminary exam total. The cost is that for these two years you are paid a government subsidy.

The Special Post Plan (特岗计划) is one of the few paths with “an established post at the end of the term” written into it. The requirements are a bachelor's degree or higher, mainly from teacher-education majors, an age of no more than 30, and the corresponding teacher qualification certificate. The service term is three years, and pay and benefits during these three years are the same as for teachers with established posts at local public schools. For those who complete the three years, pass the assessment and are willing to stay, the document requires that they be given an established post promptly.

Neither path has the “junior college or above” threshold. Firefighters are recruited from people aged 18 to 22 with a senior-high-school education or above; for people with a junior-college degree or above and for discharged soldiers, the age can be extended to 24. Civilian military personnel only need to have reached 18, and for entry-level posts the maximum age for first-time recruitment is 35. The shared cost is that the political review and the physical examination weed people out.

If you didn't get to study at eighteen, there are still three formal channels later: self-study exams, adult college entrance exams and open universities. Self-study exams have no age limit and don't look at what level you studied to before, but full-time enrolled students cannot apply. Adult college entrance exams require that you first have a high-school or junior-college diploma. All three paths are slow, but none of them looks at how you did in the exams at eighteen.

Not joining an employer doesn't mean social insurance stops being your concern; it just means no one pays that half for you. The document requires localities to lift the household registration (hukou) restrictions on flexibly employed people insuring themselves where they work; a few megacities may lift them gradually. So don't take “freedom” to mean you don't have to deal with social insurance. If you stop paying for stretches, both your pension and your medical insurance (医保) reimbursements are calculated under the rules for interrupted contributions.

For people who deliver food, drive for ride-hailing services or haul same-city freight, the platform must pay occupational injury protection fees for you per order; you don't pay a cent, and every order you take is covered. This is still a pilot; before taking orders, first check whether your province and platform are within its scope. If you already have a labor relationship with the platform, you go through work-injury insurance, not this scheme.

On both paths the state pays for you up front, and after graduation you go to a designated place under the agreement and work there for 6 years. Publicly funded teacher-education students are recruited only at six normal universities directly under the Ministry of Education, in the early admission batch. Targeted medical students must sign a three-party agreement before receiving the admission notice. Breaking the agreement means repaying the money and paying liquidated damages, and it also goes on your credit record. Think through whether you can accept these 6 years before you fill in your applications.

When it comes to working abroad, the law regulates not you but the company that organizes your going. Only enterprises that have obtained a foreign labor service cooperation business qualification certificate and completed registration may do this. If you hear “go over on a tourist visa first and switch to a work visa later,” that sentence by itself shows the other side is breaking the law. The company also may not charge you a security deposit under any name, or require you to put up property as a guarantee.

Whether this money counts as domestic or foreign depends on where you do the work, not where the money is paid in from. If you are in China working remotely for a foreign company, it counts as domestic income, and you pay individual income tax domestically. The foreign company has no entity in China, so no one withholds it for you; you have to file this tax yourself. The money coming in goes through the “employee compensation” route.

If you really must borrow to get started, look first at this loan with a government interest subsidy. An individual can borrow up to 300,000 yuan for up to 3 years, and the government pays half the interest for you. One hard condition is often overlooked: when you apply, neither you nor your spouse may have any other loans in your names; only student loans, small loans for people lifted out of poverty, mortgages, car loans and small consumer loans of 50,000 yuan or less are not counted.