Download Local People`s Congresses in China: Development and Transition

Local People's Congresses in China: Development and
Transition
Young Nam Cho, Local People's Congresses in China: Development and Transition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, xiii + 191 pp., 45.00 h/b.
The development of a market economy and the opening-up of China to the outside world,
which started at the end of the 1970s, markedly accelerated in the 1990s. This process
required the installation of a 'rule of law', and the enhancement of the possibilities for local
decision making. As a result, local people's congresses became the nucleus of legislative
development. Moreover, the liberalisation of the economy initiated the growing autonomy of
society from the state. Social organisations, along with business enterprises and ordinary
people, increasingly started to employ laws to secure their rights and interests from the
encroachment of the state, thus giving state-society relations a new appearance.
Relying on literary and interview documents of the period from 1997 to 2006, and focusing
on Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangdong, the author of this book investigates the functioning and
role of the local people's congresses in the reform era. These documents are supplemented
with relevant data and case studies from other regions, thus providing a more general picture
of the development of local people's congresses for the whole of China.
The author's analysis shows that local legislatures have become active lawmaking bodies,
especially in the field of economic reforms; they have gradually become recognised as the
proper lawmaking authority; and in line with this development, since the 1990s, deputies to
the local legislatures have become progressively more representative than before. Party
leaders emphasise this representative role because it supplies them with a channel to know
and understand social problems, and because it enhances social integrity by alleviating public
dissatisfaction. Legislatures thus succeeded in squeezing support from the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) in the name of the people. For the people themselves, deputies have
become an important channel for expressing their demands and complaints. Legislative
members have also become important assistants to the CCP top leadership to supervise
inadequate policy implementation by local governments and to control the corruption of midlevel and low-level officials.
Development of the legislative power naturally encroaches on the relation with and the power
separation between the legislative, executive and juridical powers in contemporary China.
Local governments are legally responsible to local legislatures and subject to legislative
supervision. As state organs, however, local legislatures and governments should both carry
out CCP policy. This makes their relation traditionally a division of labour rather than a
separation of powers. This book shows how Chinese local legislatures, after an initial period
in which they tried to get the support of—rather than autonomy from—the CCP, have, since
the early 1990s, taken a more assertive attitude toward local government bodies, thus
emerging as a new political power in local politics.
In the past three decades of economic reform, courts have also become more important in
resolving the increasing number of civil and economic disputes. Since their status was
improved in the 1990s, local legislatures have actively conducted the oversight of courts.
Courts initially opposed this supervision, but they have gradually changed their attitude. The
result is an entwinement strategy of courts with legislatures rather than confrontation.
A picture thus emerges of local legislatures that have strengthened lawmaking and
supervisory roles and have thereby become important political forces, along with the CCP and
the local governments. It is the introduction of a market economy and legalisation policy by
the CCP leadership on a national level, rather than democratic demands and pressure from
below, which has caused this transition. Political development in China is revealed to be a
process of institutionalisation, more than a process of democratisation. China's political
leaders envision legislative development as a means to develop China's legal system and to
rationalise its governance, which involves a shift to a system in which ordinary people, as
well as each state organ and social organisation, jointly take part in political decision-making.
This peculiar developmental process reveals the limitations of the traditional structuralfunctional approach for investigating the actual functions of local legislatures, and the
legislatures' relationships and interactions with other state organs of local governments and
courts as well as the CCP; it fails to provide an adequate elucidation of informal political
relations, which significantly influence the operations of legislatures but which rarely surface
in formal institutions. A relevant phenomenon is the following: contrary to common opinion,
the level of economic development appears to be negatively correlated with legislative
supervision over governments and the dissemination of democratic committee elections by
villagers. For local political elites in an economically developed region, rapid economic
growth is a more legitimate and powerful path to promotion than political reform. It is the
political leaders of economically less-developed regions, who have little chance to promote
themselves through economic success, who pursue political reform.
Analysis of the data in this book shows that, in contrast to civil society theory, social forces
can induce shifts in state-society relations and political change from within the political
regime through proactive co-operation—rather than antagonistic confrontation—with the state,
or by intensifying their embeddedness in—rather than increasing independence from—the
state. The rising status of Chinese local legislatures is a significant step toward a major
political reform, and an analysis of the causes and mechanisms of legislative development can
provide deeper insights into this political change.
It is to be expected that, in the future, power from below—deputies and the public—will
increasingly be the primary force in legislative development, and that Chinese legislatures
will thereby be more representative or liberalised than they are now. For further legislative
development in China, readjusting the relations between the CCP and legislatures will thus
become a central problem.
Apart from revealing interesting data on the functioning of local people's congresses, this
book critically discusses the limitations of the current methodologies of research in the field.
This gives this well researched and readable book an extra theoretical dimension, thus making
it a work of critical reflection that will also benefit research in regions other than China.
Bart Dessein © 2010