Activating the National People’s Congress

2023

This thesis discusses and analyses the socialist rule of law project of the Communist Party of China (CPC), how the CPC is trying to construct a socialist rule of law state under the Xi Jinping-led CPC and the institutional dilemmas this project faces. These reforms are taking place within the framework of unitary power, and the CPC faces a set of dilemmas peculiar to this system of governance in its attempt to construct a socialist rule of law state. The main finding of this thesis is that China has, through the socialist rule of law project, formalised its decision-making system, strengthened accountability mechanisms and weakened informal authority. The Chinese socialist rule of law project differs from its counterparts in the former socialist states of Europe, the remaining socialist states and the liberal rule of law. Unlike the Communist Party of Vietnam, which has strengthened collective decision-making institutions at the expense of a single leader, the CPC seeks to empower the leader and centralise authority. Despite this, efforts have been made by the CPC to formalise decision-making processes at the central level. The socialist rule of law project has, however, had the most impact on the lower level of governance, which is now more rulebound than earlier. Notwithstanding, Xi’s long-lasting leadership and the lack of proper accountability mechanisms over the central party leadership might hamper the socialist rule of law project in the long run.

At its annual session in March 2018, the National People's Congress (NPC) approved a series of changes to the structure and organisation of the Central People's Government (also known as the State Council of the People's Republic of China, further in the text referred to as the central government) and an amendment to China's constitution. It also announced nominations to several important state offices. This represents a crowning achievement and formal confirmation of the process of changes to the Chinese system of power that has been ongoing since 2012. The purpose of these changes is to secure continued governance by the Communist Party of China (CPC), to maintain domestic stability and to break the impasse in economic and social reforms. The general thrust of these changes involves a shift in decision-making power and a transfer of control in terms of how the state apparatus works to organs of the CPC, at the cost of central government institutions and local governments. This is being done by concentrating power in the hands of the party's General Secretary, Xi Jinping, who in recent years has used the CPC structures to boost discipline within the party and state institutions , to increase coordination in domestic and foreign policy and to revive the process of economic and social reforms. The changes to the structure of the administrative apparatus follow the centralist ambitions of Xi Jinping. This refers both to how the central government operates and to Beijing's influence on local governments. These changes will considerably impact the functioning of the state and China's international relations.

Michał Bogusz, Jakub Jakóbowski: The Chinese Communist Party and its state Xi Jinping's conservative turn. , 2019

The fundamental feature of the Chinese political system is the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its control over all areas of the state’s operation as well as a large part of the economy. The CCP regards the state as a tool of governance, and as such it is subject to regular transformations. The representative bodies and state positions are to a large extent simply facades, and the Communist Party still retains its Leninist character. The official image of the Party monolith hides a dynamic, inter-generational and internally complex multilevel organisation, with a total of 90 million members. It is an arena of struggles for power between factions and in­terest groups and, increasingly, family clans. A strong bond which holds the CCP together is the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which gives the Chinese ruling elite its basic conceptual grid and shapes its aspirations, translating into the operation and evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The description of the PRC’s political system presented in this study focuses on answering the following questions: how does the Party rule China, who manages the Party, and how do they manage it? Part 1 is a guide to the PRC’s political system during the ‘reform and opening up’ period and presents its structure and rules of governance. Part 2 describes the fundamental change of the political regime in the PRC, associat­ed with Xi Jinping’s conservative turn. Part 3 shows how far the corrections to the PRC’s political system and personnel changes implemented by Xi Jinpinghave transformed the governance of sectoral policies: economic and foreign policy, security and social control.

MacroPolo, 2019

Institutional reforms may not be as appealing as “liberalizing” economic reforms but, from Beijing’s perspective, they are the key to China’s future. While the Fourth Plenum’s Decision did not offer many concrete policies—not unusual for such high-level statements—it consolidated many developing strands of Chinese leader Xi Jinping ’s agenda into one authoritative document. In that vein, the Decision offers a revealing overview of the CCP’s overarching policy priority to improve the underlying structures of its rule to better govern an evermore complex China. The following analysis provides context for and analyzes major pillars of this governance reform program.

The China Quarterly

Democratic centralism, a hallmark of Leninist party organizations, has played a formative role in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet despite being hailed as an “inviolable” and “unchanging” Party principle, understandings of democratic centralism have shifted dramatically over the century of its existence. This study traces the long arc of the concept's evolution across successive Party Constitutions, focusing on three critical historical junctures: the Sixth Party Congress, which formally adopted democratic centralism into its Constitution as an organizational principle; the Seventh Party Congress, which adopted rectification as the Party's practice of democratic centralism; and the 19th Party Congress, which set a new milestone in codifying the system as a disciplinary tool. I argue that while democratic centralism exemplifies the CCP's institutional plasticity and adaptive governance and is critical to understanding Party-driven constitutionalism in...

Egmont Institute Security Policy Brief, 2022

The 2,340 odd teacups have been rearranged in their cupboards, and sobriety has returned to the Great Hall of the People. What is the national and international impact of the 20th CCP Congress that was concluded on Saturday, 22 October 2022? Stability is the key word.

Legal reform has been a prominent point on the agenda since Xi Jinping took over the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the Third Plenum of the Party’s 18th National Congress in 2013, Xi proposed comprehensively pursuing four strategic political goals under the slogan “Four Comprehensives” (sige quanmian 四個全面). Two of the political goals, namely, to comprehensively strengthen discipline of the Party” (quanmian congyan zhidang 全面從嚴治黨) and to comprehensively rule the country according to the law” (quanmian yifa zhiguo 全面依法治國), set the grounds for the latest round of legal reform. The Central Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform (Zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu 中央全面深化改革領導小組) was set up to carry out the “Four Comprehensives.” Deepening judicial reform in the direction of building a just and efficient judiciary that the citizens can trust is regarded as an integral part of the plan to comprehensively rule the country according to the law. In fact, 13 out of the 19 plenary sessions of the Leading Group involved the topic of judicial reform from 2014 to 2015. The call for “ruling the country according to the law” can be dated back to September 1997, when Jiang Zemin at the 15th CCP’s National Congress addressed the need to construct the socialist state in accordance with the law (jianshe shehuizhuyi fazhi guojia 建設社會主義法治國家). In recent years, the Chinese term fazhi 法治has re-emerged frequently in public discourse. Yet, observers of Chinese politics realise that the concept of fazhi by the Xi administration might not be best captured by the notion of “rule of law,” but would be better interpreted as “rule by law.” This article is intended to chart the details and implications of legal reform in the broader context of the pursuit of law-based governance and discusses the notion of fazhi under Xi’s leadership.

2013

Fordham International Law Journal, 2018

MacroPolo, 2019

But who does the NPC actually represent? Who are the 2,975 NPC delegates who descended on Beijing this March? The conclusion of this year’s Two Sessions is an opportune moment to compare several demographic characteristics of NPC “representatives,” as compiled by NPC Observer, with the 375 “policymakers” with full or alternate membership of the CCP Central Committee (CC). The Committee, MacroPolo’s relaunched digital interactive on Chinese elite politics, can now capture interesting but overlooked patterns and trends with the latest biographical data and enhanced search functions. Here, we look at several different types of representation: geographic, ethnic, gender, and generational. Co-authored with Damien Ma.