Specifically, any motion raised by a delegate and supported by three others obligated the corresponding government authorities to respond. Congresses at each level examined and approved budgets and the plans for the economic and social development of their respective administrative areas. They also maintained public order, protected public property, and safeguarded the rights of citizens of all nationalities.
About 7 percent of the total population was composed of minority nationalities concentrated mainly in sensitive border areas. All deputies were to maintain close and responsive contacts with their various constituents. Before people's congresses at and above the county level did not have standing committees.
These had been considered superfluous because the local congresses did not have a heavy workload and in any case could serve adequately as executive bodies for the local organs of power. The CCP's decision in to adopt the Four Modernizations as its official party line, however, produced a critical need for broad mass support and the means to mobilize that support for the varied activities of both party and state organs.
In short, the new programs revealed the importance of responsive government. The CCP view was that the standing committees were better equipped than the local people's governments to address such functions as convening the people's congresses; keeping in touch with the grass roots and their deputies; supervising, inspecting, appointing, and removing local administrative and judicial personnel; and preparing for the election of local deputies to the next higher people's congresses.
The use of standing committees was seen as a more effective and rational way to supervise the activities of the local people's governments than requiring that local administrative authorities check and balance themselves. The proclaimed purpose of the standing committee system was to make local governments more responsible and more responsive to constituents. The establishment of the standing committees in effect also meant restoring the formal division of responsibilities between party and state authorities that had existed before The reform mandated that the party should not interfere with the administrative activities of local government organs and that its function should be confined to "political leadership" to ensure that the party's line was correctly followed and implemented.
Provincial-level party secretaries, for instance, were no longer allowed to serve concurrently as provincial-level governors or deputy governors chairmen or vice chairmen in autonomous regions, and mayors or deputy mayors in special municipalities , as they had been allowed to do during the Cultural Revolution.
In this connection most officials who had held positions in the former provincial-level revolutionary committees were excluded from the new local people's governments. Some provincial-level officials who were purged during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated and returned to power. The Chinese Constitution charges local congresses and governments with legislating on specific matters relating to the localities and drafting local regulations to implement certain NPC laws.
Local governments also have the power to draft regulations or detailed implementation rules similar to those that a State Council ministry would draft. The Legislation Law requires that local congresses and governments have internal procedures similar to those laid out for the NPC and its Standing Committee for drafting and debating legislation.
In the past decade, LPCs have been the focal point for much of the experimentation occurring in China in reforming legislative processes.
This trend is due in part to increasing popular demand. The Chinese public no longer places complete trust in government officials or institutions, and increasingly looks to the law as a tool to limit government powers. As a result, the public has shown a growing interest both in seeing quality legislation produced and in having a role in the legislative process. Many local people's congresses now view public participation and transparency as vehicles to gain legitimacy for their legislation.
In Shanghai, which is often the center of nascent legal reform efforts, the Shanghai People's Congress has taken a number of steps to open up its legislative process. The Shanghai People's Congress now makes a practice of seeking the views of the Shanghai Bar Association when issuing any new laws, and Chinese lawyers report that the people's congress is considering financial support for academics to draft legislation.
Moreover, the Shanghai People's Congress has been a pioneer in holding open hearings on legislation. Using a model for public hearings based on U. This process is evolving. The Shanghai People's Congress has experimented with different methods to notify the public about the hearings and with a variety of formats for the hearings themselves. It also has sought input and feedback from a number of sources on how to improve its hearings.
Shanghai has seen a growing number of exchanges with delegations from other LPCs interested in improving public participation in the drafting process. Other LPCs also have begun making efforts to improve the transparency of their legislative processes in the past year.
This decision was the first attempt by Yunnan authorities to open the legislative process to public participation. According to Na Qi of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, this experiment may enhance transparency in legislative activities and provides new means of measuring public opinion. The Sichuan People's Congress has been publicly soliciting proposals since November , and it included 13 proposals it received through the solicitation process in the Standing Committee's Plan on Legislation Proposals.
In December , the Guiyang Municipal People's Congress began soliciting legislative proposals as well as comments from the public on existing legislation. The Standing Committee of Zhejiang Province has announced a plan to regularize public participation in its legislative process by opening all of its meetings to the public. Other cities and provinces that have begun to collect suggestions on legislation from citizens include Beijing, Kunming, Gansu, and Guangdong.
These efforts to improve transparency are limited, however, to only a small number of geographic areas. Finally I understood John Maynard Keynes. I have only a rudimentary background understanding of economics so many of the concepts in this course were new to me, but the teachers and supplementary materials were more than sufficient to understand. Would be interested in more courses like this. This is a fascinating course which ties economics to politics through a number of key protagonists.
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Build your knowledge with top universities and organisations. It needs to confront this gap forthrightly, and either adjust those capabilities or find a way of scaling back its objectives.
The hundreds of thousands of Chinese who study, work, and live abroad do so because they want to better their lives, and find that foreign countries offer better opportunities than their own. But the CCP through its United Front department wants to keep them loyal to China and use them where possible to advance the interests of Chinese foreign policy.
This then unfairly casts suspicions on ethnic Chinese citizens and leads to prejudice and unfounded charges of dual loyalty. The regime is totalitarian in aspiration, but not necessarily in reality. We do not know how effective the new technological methods of control like the social credit system will ultimately be. Chinese citizens still have more personal freedom today than citizens of North Korea.
Earlier dalliances with totalitarian control proved self-defeating: The Qin Dynasty lasted only for 16 years, and the Cultural Revolution exhausted itself within a decade. H ow might China change in the future, both with regard to the mechanism of change, and the long-run outcomes we might hope for? With regard to mechanisms, it would appear very unlikely that change will come from below in a broad, grass-roots movement of the sorts we have seen in the different color revolutions or in the early days of the Arab Spring.
The regime has plenty of repressive power that it has not been reluctant to make use of when necessary. If change were to come, it would have to originate within the upper reaches of the Party itself. Deng Xiaoping left a legacy of collective leadership, in which no single individual could amass dictatorial power of the sort exercised by Mao. This system served the country well for over 30 years, but Xi has upended it completely, sidelining other senior leaders, revoking the term limits that would have forced him to step down after 10 years, and building a cult of personality around himself.
An elite conspiracy like the one that brought down Nikita Khrushchev in the former Soviet Union would be very hard to pull off, but under uncertain economic conditions, internal leadership divisions could increase sharply.
The optimal path would be a sequenced transition in which the country first liberalized, and then began to democratize—the path followed by many European countries in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The beginning point would be a transition from rule by law to rule of law. Clear rules need to apply not just to ordinary citizens and to lower levels of the government, but to the Party itself.
Citizens would need to be given much more freedom to speak, think, organize, and criticize, at least to the extent they could in the good old days pre-Xi Jinping.
A near-term transition to multi-party democracy of the sort that happened in Taiwan or South Korea in the s would be much more problematic. The 90 million-member CCP is not just a political grouping that directs the government from above, as in a parliamentary democracy; it is the government for all intents and purposes, and contains a large part of the capacity required to make the state work.
Democratization would have to begin within the Party itself, with greater autonomy given to lower-level organs whose authority would flow upwards to the higher levels, the reverse of the current situation. There is limited value to speculating in great detail as to the kinds of reforms that might take place in a future China. Pushing China in these directions should not be part of U. Pressure from a weakening and in many respects discredited United States in the wake of the global pandemic will almost certainly be counterproductive.
These changes must come from the Chinese people themselves, and specifically from Chinese elites who understand the way their present system works and what the potential pressure points for change may be.
What Americans need to keep in mind is that their enemy and rival right now is not China, but a Chinese Communist Party that has shifted into high-totalitarian mode. We are not dealing with the China of the s or even the s, but a completely different animal that represents a clear challenge to our democratic values. We need to hold it at bay until some point in the future when it returns to being a more normal authoritarian country, or indeed is on its way to being a liberal country.
That will not necessarily eliminate the challenge that China represents; a more liberal China could easily be more nationalistic. But it will nonetheless be easier to deal with in many ways. Unfortunately, over the past three and a half years, the United States has been doing everything it can to weaken itself. It has elected a leader who revels in demonizing his domestic opponents far more than his foreign rivals, who has blithely thrown away the moral high ground that used to be the foundation of American global power, and who has governed the country with such incompetence during the largest crisis of the past three generations that it is no longer taken seriously by either friends or enemies.
While democracies as a group have not done worse than authoritarian governments in controlling the crisis, China is able to present itself as having outperformed the United States, and that bilateral comparison is the one that people are paying attention to around the world right now.
Before we can think about changing China, we need to change the United States and try to restore its position as a global beacon of liberal democratic values around the world. The American Interest. About Us. If China were to change, what should the Chinese people hope for?
Appeared in: Volume 15, Number 6 Published on: May 18,
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