In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 103 The People’s Congress System and China’s Constitutional Development shi฀hexing In contemporary China, the National People’s Congress (NPC) is the highest organ of state power, the source of power of all other organs of state power, and the core of the country’s political system. The NPC and the local people’s congresses together constitute the people’s congress system (PCS). The people’s congress system was confirmed in the Common Program of the Chinese People ’s Political Consultative Conference in 1949 and legally established in the first Constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 1954. The system was further specified in various articles of the Constitution as amended in 1982. The standard expression is that the people’s congress system is China’s fundamental political system. One cannot grasp contemporary China’s political development and outlook without understanding this fundamental political system. Because the system was introduced along with the Constitution, it is appropriate to study them together. According to the official website of the NPC and other sources, the PCS, as China’s fundamental political system, has five major properties. First, the power of the People’s Congress comes from the people. The congress is elected by, accountable to, and subject to the oversight of the people. Second, the power of the People’s Congress is exercised collectively, with collective deliberation and decisionmaking and by strict adherence to the principle of democratic centralism . Third, other organs of state power, including the administrative, judicial, and procuratorial organs of the state, are created by the People’s Congress, to which they are accountable and by which they are overseen. Fourth, the PCS 03-2535-0 chap3.indd 103 3/28/14 10:17 AM 104 Shi Hexing establishes the corresponding central-local relationship and divides the functions of organs of state power at the central and local levels in accordance with the principle that the central government should have leadership over and give full scope to the initiative of local governments. Fifth, the PCS establishes the relationship between the whole state and minority autonomous regions, in which the regions inhabited by minority ethnic groups implement regional ethnic autonomy on the basis of safeguarding the country’s unity.1 These five features paint a comprehensive picture of China’s PCS. In the past, many people deemed the representative assemblies of socialist states to be merely rubber stamps. This view had some descriptive truth historically but was also more or less an ideological judgment. Today, similar views are largely criticized and corrected by both Chinese and Western scholars. Since the 1990s, legislative organs have played an increasingly important role in socialist states. The view that China’s PCS is a rubber stamp is obviously outdated.2 In fact, despite the influence of the Soviet system, China’s PCS had its own unique mechanism from the very start and has since developed along its own unique path. Although most scholars of Chinese political studies touch on the PCS in their research, for a long period of time the system did not receive special attention or get the focus it deserves.3 Even some Chinese political scholars have made factual errors in explaining China’s political process. Some of these errors were enumerated by Xia Ming, who specializes in the study of China’s local people’s congresses.4 That the PCS has been constantly strengthened since the reform and opening-up period has caught the attention of an increasing number of Chinese and foreign scholars, among others. Since the 1990s, scholars of Chinese politics have increasingly come to the realization that the growing independence of the People’s Congress has no less significance than both the end of lifelong tenure for leadership positions and the decentralization of power. As a result, there has been an increasing amount of research on the people’s congress system.5 It was against this backdrop that Kevin O’Brien, Murray Scot Tanner, and others conducted systematic studies of the PCS. O’Brien uses his theories of role conflict and embeddedness to analyze the identities of People’s Congress deputies and the relationship between the People’s Congress, on one hand, and the party and government, on the other. With the advancement of such studies, Roderick MacFarquhar recommends more scholarship on the system of provincial-level people’s congresses. In fact, Xia Ming and other scholars have already begun special research on people’s congresses at the provincial and lower levels...

Share