The guokao, formally the National Civil Service Examination, is the exam China’s central government uses to hire staff for its own ministries, party organs, and the agencies it manages directly. It is organized every year by the State Administration of Civil Service (SCS), the body responsible for civil servant management and recruitment policy at the national level. For the 2026 intake, a record 2.83 million candidates sat the written test for 38,100 positions, a ratio of roughly 74 applicants per post and the most competitive cycle in the exam’s history.
The written stage has two papers, sat on the same day. Xingce, the Administrative Aptitude Test, is a timed, machine-scored paper of around 130 multiple-choice questions covering verbal and language comprehension, quantitative relations, judgmental reasoning, data analysis, and general knowledge. Shenlun, the essay or discourse paper, asks candidates to read a set of source materials on a policy or social issue and write structured analytical and prescriptive responses, testing the kind of writing and reasoning expected of a government administrator rather than rote recall. Positions in specialist fields such as public security, foreign affairs, or financial regulation add a professional subject paper on top of the two public papers. Candidates who clear the written cut-off move to resume and qualification review, then an interview, and for some positions a physical fitness assessment, before a final physical examination and political background review.
Positions fall into two broad categories. Central party and government organ posts sit inside ministries and central bodies themselves. Vertically-managed agency posts, such as customs, taxation, and financial regulators, are centrally administered but work at local level, and they generally carry a lower educational bar and draw the bulk of applications because of that lower entry threshold.
Age eligibility changed materially for the 2026 cycle. The general age band had stood at 18 to 35 for roughly three decades; the SCS raised the ceiling to 38 starting with the 2026 intake, and raised the extension for master’s and doctoral graduates from 40 to 43, as part of a broader policy response to China’s aging workforce.
Around the guokao sits a large commercial exam-prep industry. Firms such as Offcn Education Technology (known as Zhonggong), Huatu, and Fenbi run classroom courses, mock exams, and coaching packages built specifically around Xingce and Shenlun, and their scale is a useful signal of how central the guokao is to a segment of China’s job market.
The guokao is distinct from the shengkao, the provincial civil service exams that each province, municipality, and autonomous region runs separately, on its own calendar, for local government posts. The papers look similar in format, but the shengkao is administered regionally rather than by the SCS, and a candidate can and often does sit both in the same recruitment season since the exams do not conflict on eligibility grounds.