Opinion | Shanghai civil servants hope for raise if 'stingy' Party chief gets promotion
A period of austerity could end if party boss Yu Zhengsheng moves on after a possible promotion at the national congress
Shanghai civil servants have their fingers crossed in anticipation that they could finally get a pay rise if municipal party boss Yu Zhengsheng moves on after a possible promotion at the Communist Party's upcoming 18th national congress.
The city's 100,000 civil servants have not seen a salary increase since Yu took the reins from president-to-be Xi Jinping in October 2007. The recent austerity is in stark contrast to the more generous days of Chen Liangyu, before he was shown the door amid corruption charges.
Many civil servants secretly blame Yu for keeping a tight rein on the local purse to burnish his image for the central government.
Whether such speculation is true, the fact that Yu - a native of Shaoxing city, Zhejiang province - never spent time in the Shanghai government before his appointment as party boss did little to improve his popularity among the bureaucratic corps.
Despite Shanghai's reputation as the mainland's most international and cosmopolitan big city, its government remains insular and clubby and shows a strong resistance to outside leaders. The "Shanghai gang" is alive and well.
The three Shanghai bosses before Xi - Chen, Huang Ju and Wu Bangguo, each spent decades working through the ranks in Shanghai before their promotion to the top post. Former president Jiang Zemin, who became Shanghai mayor in 1985, had worked intermittently in the city since 1947.
Yu belongs to the so-called princeling faction. Yu's father, Yu Qiwei, was the first mayor of Tianjin after the Communist Party's victory in 1949. Yu Zhengsheng's mother, Fan Jin, was vice-mayor of Beijing.