China’s Revolutionary Hope?

March 15, 2010

By Minxin Pei

Sadly, such openness in policymaking is hard to imagine today. In terms of law-making, the NPC has become virtually irrelevant, with not a single piece of legislation passed in the last 20 years having been proposed by an NPC delegate, even though official Chinese data boasts that each NPC annual session generates several hundred legislative proposals from its delegates (all NPC-approved legislations are proposed by the State Council, the Chinese cabinet.)

So, if the NPC is not part of the policymaking equation, why should the Communist Party bother with an elaborate staging of its annual sessions at all?

Cynics would argue that the party needs to show off its success in managing the economy and pretend that it’s a caring government that responds to the voices of the people. The NPC may not be a genuine forum for deliberating China’s policies, but its annual sessions do provide a convenient platform for senior leaders to rattle off endless statistics on economic growth and rising standards of living. As political theatre, nothing inside China is remotely comparable to the NPC. Here, you can see senior party officials adopt populist notes and angrily denounce corruption, inequality and abuse of power in front of Chinese TV cameras (though nobody expects the NPC to do anything about these vices).

Yet, behind these elaborate political rituals, there could actually be some glimmers of hope that China’s political system could begin to unfreeze itself. At least once a year, China’s ruling elites have to deliver a report card to the Chinese people. Although the Chinese people cannot, in any meaningful sense, grade the party, the NPC sessions are rare opportunities for them to put the all-mighty CCP on the defensive.

And it’s here the experience of the Soviet collapse offers some cause for optimism. Before Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the Soviet equivalent of the Chinese NPC was nothing but a rubber stamp. But once real political reform began, the Soviet people’s congress quickly established itself as an institutional rival to the Soviet communist party. Boris Yelstin rallied the opposition to the party not on the street, but inside the halls of the Soviet people’s congress.

Obviously, such a scenario is not one the current Chinese leadership would like to see repeated in China. But in all likelihood, and to the extent that future political opening in China will be driven by CCP politicians acting like populists (what else can they be?), the NPC will almost certainly be the ideal political platform to exploit if a challenge to the party itself is mounted.

Minxin Pei is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and an adjunct senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace