District in Wuhan is looking for university grads to manage its public toilets

Netizens have joked that they are not sure their degrees qualify them for such work

A district in the city of Wuhan has been getting quite a lot of crap online recently for a job recruitment advert seeking a pair of prospective public toilet managers which required that applicants for the positions be under 30 years old and have at least a bachelor’s degree.

“If you don’t study hard, you won’t even be qualified enough to run a public toilet,” joked one netizen after the reading the ad, according to the local cqcb.com.

Another web user quipped that the managers’ supervisor must therefore hold at least a master’s degree, while one graduate wrote that he wasn’t sure that his own degree had really adequately prepared him to clean public toilets.

In response to this mockery, an official at the city’s Hongshan District Urban Management Committee emphasized to cqcb.com that the positions requiring a college degree were not toilet cleaners but toilet managers, who would be in charge of administering several of the district’s public bathrooms.

The unnamed official further declared that the high requirements for the job showed how much importance the district attached to its public restrooms.

China is currently in the middle of a so-called “toilet revolution,” aimed at improving crappy public toilets in China’s crowded cities and particularly in its rural areas. Yesterday, for instance, it was announced that the western province of Qinghai would invest $500 million in building and renovating 198,000 public toilets over the next three years.