I knew very little about China’s civil service until I adopted a child whose Chinese name means “does well in the imperial examinations”, the highly competitive tests which chose those destined for top government positions in China for 1,300 years.

I kept that moniker, given to her by her orphanage carers, as her middle name – though I wasn’t much inclined to call her “got 2,400 on the SAT” as her first name. But I appreciated the nannies’ decision to label her from birth as a Chinese success story. For until recently most parents would have been delighted to see their child secure a coveted place in the mainland civil service (complete with iron rice bowl). For years government jobs have always taken the top spot in surveys of the preferences of Chinese job seekers. The orphanage nannies were wishing her the brightest of futures, in a country with an ancient tradition of public service.

But when applicants sat down last weekend to take the annual exam to enter the civil service, they found themselves facing dramatically altered attitudes to government employment: the number of test-takers fell by as much as a third in some provinces, and others recorded a rate of no-shows that was the highest in history, according to the Chinese press. They appear to have been put off by cuts in benefits such as low-cost healthcare and housing subsidies, along with the high-profile anti-corruption crackdown that has choked off the flow of grey income into that old rice bowl.