Applicants for the national-level civil servant exam wait outside the test site at Nanjing Forestry University in Jiangsu province in this Nov 24, 2013 file photo. [Photo/IC]

REPORTS SHOW that among civil servants, the percentage of leaders or officials at administrative levels is distortedly high. A comment in China Youth Daily calls for deeper reform to change that:

There is a contradiction in China's bureaucratic system: Governments are being enlarged every year and new offices are filled with new employees, yet civil servants keep complaining about shortage of staff.

The reason for that is now clear: The majority of civil servants are administrative-level leaders who only issue orders.

A good example is the bureau of technology in a province in which 61 of the 82 employees are administrative-level officials. That means only 21 staff members actually work while almost three-fourths of them just issue orders.

A more common phenomenon is that, many cities have almost a dozen vice-mayors.

It is the redundant officials that have lowered the efficiency of the governments. Besides, such officials enjoy the welfare and perks at taxpayers' cost, whose cumulative amount comprises a high percentage of the annual national budget, making it impossible to provide sufficient social welfare for ordinary citizens. The redundant officials have made work and life increasingly difficult for the civil servants who do the actual work.

According to recent data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, China has a total of 7.16 million civil servants. It can be concluded from the report that only a small percentage of them are non-leader civil servants at the bottom level.

These bottom-level civil servants are doing most of the job yet they get the lowest salaries in the bureaucracy. One such example is Hong Sheng, deputy chief of a small town in East China's Anhui province, who reportedly used car-hailing apps to ferry commuters to work because his salary was not enough to cover his child's medical expenses.

It is time the higher authorities got rid of the redundant officials to raise the administrative efficiency and lower the costs.