It turns out that the government’s use of the most common password in the world led to Hunan civil servants’ salary information being leaked earlier this week, revealing that being an official in the CCP is not a very lucrative day job.
According to the leaked stats, a “vast majority of local civil servants earn 2,001 to 4,000 yuan” per month, not including subsidies, and provincial Party chiefs have opened up to lament that “Any migrant worker earns more money than me.”
The Global Times’ Wen Ya reports that all of this information was easily accessed by curious netizens who were able to infiltrate the local government’s salary database with pretty much zero effort.
According to a post by Net user “Dancing Angel” in online forum tianya.cn on January 25, one could check all the monthly salaries of civil servants at Lengshuijiang, a county-level city, by entering the password “123456″ at the local salary management website.
Zhang Dongfeng, a reporter from the Nandu Daily, said he tried the password on Monday and was able to access all the salary information. But by Tuesday it no longer worked. [Local officials might have upgraded the password to “1234567”, the eighth most common, “12345678”, the third, or “123456789”, the sixth.]
[…] “Civil servants in lower level government agencies surely receive low salaries. But no one knows how much hidden income they have,” Song [Ze of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Finance and Trade Economics] said, noting greater transparency is needed.
