One thing's for sure: when the doors open at the start of the next exam, there will be over three thousand test-takers sitting outside the test center nervously memorizing an English toast.

"56.2% of the government officials taking the test hold a master's degree or higher. The vast majority of them have at least a college degree. It is hard to imagine so many educated people racking their brains trying to come up with the 'English toast' that is so vital to their career."

Actually, it is not hard to imagine if you know anything about the Chinese upper education system.

It'd be really interesting to find out more about the 17 candidates from 境外.

My Chinese bureaucrat brothers:

Here is a good toast for state dinners with capitalist Westerners.

"Here's to honor. Get on her and stay on her."

Then pound your drink. You will earn mad respect.

Being able to write a celebrity roast might be more useful.

"jing wai" includes HK and Macau.

This is crap, and its getting crappier, English is out of hand in China, most students don't give a first thought on whether they really need it or not, and employers don't too, they just worship the language for no reason.
I frequently see idiots taking vocabulary lessons on public bus, some would murmur like a sissy girl, and they seem to be quite happy about what they are doing, until they find out they forget more than they can remember. And many who were hardcore on it never actually use the language in their career.
Our education system needs a complete overhaul, in which the English learning needs to be downgraded, now don't get me wrong, its perfectly ok to learn the language, but schools need to do some research and re-exam the necessity.
/rant over

Jingwai also refers to Chinese citizen who hold a permanent resident card in a foreign country (US green card, EU 10 year card…) and are no longer registered in a local Chinese Hukou.

Why do Chinese media always give ridiculous degress of precision on statistics? (like 56.2%) It's meaningless and wrong. 56.2% of the 3828 candidates works out at 2151.336 officials holding a degree ... Duhhh?

Theo: it's not just the media, I think they teach it in the schools. The Chinese staff at my old company didn't even see what the problem was - they eventually stopped doing it for reports that I would see, but anything in Chinese invariably had 4 significant digits of precision, even when the numbers were based on something much less accurate (if you estimated a value of 3 million dollars, that would become 20.514 million RMB).

I realise this is completely off topic, but it's a real pet peeve of mine, only rivalled by the bizzare choice of powers of ten that often turns figures like the previous example into 0.0205 billion.