On Dwarf Parties and Flower Pots

Less gabbing and confabbing at the People’s Congress

China’s National People’s Congress ended yesterday without much fuss or even attention, because when nearly all power sits with the Party, and the Party primarily works through the executive branch of government, who cares about the legislature?

As it happens, I do. I covered the NPC for 14 years in a row, and although I don’t claim to hold the record among foreign journalists (it is probably held by the late, great Reuters reporter Benjamin Kang Lim), it is safe to say I was among the few who enjoyed the experience.

What I liked about those two weeks in early March was the brief glimpse into officialdom in China. A cat can look at a king during the National People’s Congress. We journalists got to watch the body language and mannerisms of the very top Party officials as they ran selected meetings or interacted with their subordinates and each other. You got the feeling for who was impatient or arrogant, who was a people person and who was a policy wonk. Some officials seemed in touch with China’s realities, others didn’t. Some showed no patience at all for eruptions of PartySpeke, others emitted nothing but.

And then there were the delegates. The National People’s Congress, drawn from the Communist Party’s 99 million members, meets concurrently with the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a relic of the Communists’ pre-1949 alliance with other left-leaning cohorts. The Communist Party does not officially run China as a one-party state – it sponsors a number of “minority parties” (also known as “dwarf parties”) whose selected members attend the CPPCC each year.

photo credit: Xinhua

Most Chinese believe that NPC delegates (“people’s representatives”) are like 花瓶, or “flower pots”. That is to say, their purpose is purely decorative. About 3,000 of them attend the NPC each year, sit in the audience, applaud on cue and vote for the legislation that the Party has crafted. The term “rubber-stamp parliament” appears in nearly every foreign media article about the Congress. The CPPCC is even more decorative, by this standard, since it doesn’t even pretend to be a legislature.

One year, back when the Reuters bureau was still in the dimly-lit Sunflower Tower down the alley between the Kempinski Hotel and the Great Wall Sheraton, I overheard two security guards out smoking and chatting while I returning from an NPC briefing. Their Beijing accents floated through the evening air. “Not one of these People’s Delegates actually comes from the People,” one growled.

The guy was right, of course, but that doesn’t mean that every delegate was a flower pot. Some were, but many were not. Many viewed their status as an NPC or a CPPCC delegate as a good way to get ahead – back in the pre-Xi Jinping days, the hotels that housed the delegates saw a constant flow of visitors openly bearing gifts. And many also viewed their participation in the NPC or CPPCC as their only chance to make a difference in how their country was governed. These delegates were a big part of the reason I enjoyed covering the NPC.

Every delegate had the right to submit a 提案 or proposal to the NPC or CPPCC. Some delegates brought quite a few! Every one of the proposals was diligently collected and catalogued by staffers of the Congress, and some were read aloud. Themes from the proposals often made it into future Party policy, because the concerns of the mid-level officials and delegates who attended the NPC and the CPPCC were good proxies for the concerns of middle class urban Chinese.

Proposals ran the gamut from politically obsequious to genuine concerns. Many focused on the cost of housing and the ubiquitous pollution that stained China’s skies grey and made its water undrinkable. There were business issues (wages too high, or not enough credit available to rural farmers and consumers), concerns for the civil rights of migrant workers, proposals for grassland and livestock management, worries about medical workers getting exposed to AIDS, and ideas about taxes or equalizing the flows of federal revenue to the provinces. I remember one doctor collecting signatures for Uighur traditional medicine to be recognized alongside Chinese traditional medicine.

Most journalists are most interested in the delegates’ thoughts about policy and the economy. There was a time when delegates felt fairly free to discuss those topics, as long as the conversation didn’t stray into anything politically sensitive.

That was then.

The lively chatter at the NPC and CPPCC meetings became noticeably more silent during Xi Jinping’s first term, and even more so in his second term. By his third term, even the number of days devoted to the meetings has dropped. They lasted a mere 6 days this year, compared with a standard 10 for many years before Covid. (The 2018 NPC, at the beginning of Xi’s third term, went on for an unusual 15 days, and it was also unusually wooden and painful to report on). The prime minister’s traditional annual press conference was cancelled last year, and it will remain cancelled, for the duration.

This year, a prime accomplishment of the NPC was a law that appears to limit the input of its lower-level delegates. The ‘Law on Deputies’ strengthens the control of the Party officials who run the People’s Congress over the lumpenPartytariat in the delegate seats. It ensures that low-level delegates remain “close to the people” and behave themselves in general.

The Law on Deputies streamlines the proposal process, according to longtime Xi ally Zhao Leji, titular head of the NPC. Instead of any delegate submitting anything he or she wishes to opine on, proposals will now be submitted well in advance. A selected few will be returned with revisions, then formally resubmitted to the Congress. They are expected to hew closely to the themes the Party has chosen in advance. This year’s theme was “technology”.

Why worry about obscure changes to the NPC or the CPPCC when real democracies are publicly struggling? In short, narrowing one of the few channels in China that carries feedback up into the Party is a worrisome trend, because leaders are more likely to become unmoored when their pipeline from the public shuts down.

There may not be much of a distinction between a rubber-stamp parliament and an array of human flower pots, but there is still a difference, and I’d hate to see that difference disappear.