That is, provided the men are at least 5 feet 6 inches tall and the women 5 feet 2\u00bd inches tall, and they are not colorblind, according to an advertisement on the career website<\/a> of the East China<\/a> Normal University seeking recruits to the Shanghai State Security Bureau.<\/p>\n Titled the \u201cShanghai State Security Bureau Preliminary Selection Announcement for 2016 Graduates,\u201d the ad has since been taken down, but a cached version still exists. Contacted by telephone, a person working at the career center who gave her name as Ms. He confirmed that the ad was genuine but expressed surprise that it had circulated publicly since such ads are generally only for internal use.<\/p>\n In the United States, the C.I.A.<\/a> has long recruited openly. But such processes in China are mostly conducted in secret \u2014 even if it is a badly kept one, as suggested by an account on Pincai.com<\/a>, a jobs site, by someone who attended a recruitment meeting in Beijing for the Ministry of State Security, the country\u2019s intelligence agency that oversees the regional bureaus.<\/p>\n An advertisement for job openings with the Shanghai State Security Bureau.<\/em><\/p>\n In the post, a person named Wang Yuele, which can also be transliterated as Wang Yueyue, described the event at an unnamed university in October 2007. The starting monthly salary while on the yearlong probation was 4,000 renminbi, about $600, with a minimum 10-year contract. Recruiters were mostly looking for graduate students with skills in \u201cinformation security,\u201d the person said, adding that similar recruitment events took place at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou; China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing; and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu.<\/p>\n \u201cThese jobs were in Beijing but with a lot of travel,\u201d this person said. \u201cIt was tiring, female students basically weren\u2019t wanted and mostly the work wasn\u2019t dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n As the Shanghai ad and the Pincai account make clear, state security recruiters regularly visit elite Chinese universities trying to identify promising students.<\/p>\n That was still the case, Ms. He said. Though the deadline for this ad had passed, there probably would be another recruitment drive at the university in June looking at 2017 job seekers, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cEach year in the summer they get in touch with us,\u201d Ms. He said.<\/p>\n Requirements change from year to year. \u201cIt depends on what they want,\u201d she said. Among the shifting criteria could be a person\u2019s \u201cbackground,\u201d she said, without elaborating.<\/p>\n According to the advertisement, in high demand are recruits with computer skills and fluency in languages spoken by China\u2019s ethnic minorities. This could reflect an interest in the online monitoring of citizens and in the observing of China\u2019s ethnic minorities, particularly theUighurs<\/a> in the far western region of Xinjiang, where resentment of Chinese rule<\/a> has sometimes erupted in violence.<\/p>\n The foreign languages that recruiters cited are English, French, German, Japanese, Russian \u201cor other minor language specialties.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Students who belong to the Uighur, Tibetan, Kazakh or Mongolian ethnic groups or who can speak those languages, or those who know Chinese dialects such as Fujianese, Hakka, Cantonese or Wu should apply, the ad said. Those are dialects spoken by people in Shanghai or in the nearby southeastern seaboard or in the south of the country.<\/p>\n Also sought were people with \u201ccomputer software, information security, communication technology and related computer specialties,\u201d the ad said. As were \u201cgraduates in international relations, international politics, Chinese, history, media, philosophy, teaching of Chinese as a foreign language and law.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA lot, really a lot, of students apply,\u201d Ms. He said. As for the recruiters, she said, \u201cTheir requirements are very high.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not clear how many people are employed by China\u2019s security services, but the number may run in the hundreds of thousands, with the Shanghai ad just one recruitment effort at one university in one city. President Xi Jinping<\/a>, who took power in late 2012, has made upgrading national security and crushing dissent a cornerstone of his rule.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/docs.uyghuramerican.org\/images\/20chinajobs02-111superJumbo.jpg\")
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