Constitution of China

· Discuss the role of Communist Party in the Chinese politics. (2008, 2001)

· What are the main characteristics of the Chinese Political System (2005)

· Political parties organization in China and role and functions of Chinese communist party.
(2011)

· Powers and functions of Chinese National People’s Congress. (2020)

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1. Main Characteristics and Features of Chinese olitical System

a. Collective Leadership

· China has had no supreme leader since the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997. The seven men who
sit on the country’s most senior decision-making body, the Communist Party’s Politburo Standing
Committee (PSC), form a collective leadership in which each man has a rank, from one to seven,
and shoulders primary responsibility for a specific portfolio. Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is
ranked first among the seven and has responsibility for convening PSC and larger Politburo
meetings. He also controls some of the most consequential portfolios, including military and
foreign affairs. Unlike his predecessor, who had to wait two years after becoming head of Party
to be named head of the military, Xi was awarded the top military post immediately upon taking
over leadership of the Party, a development that has enhanced his authority. Like all his
colleagues, however, Xi must still win consensus from the rest of the group for major decisions.
Forging agreement can be difficult, in part because members of the PSC owe their jobs to horse
trading among different constituencies, interest groups, and influential retired Party elders,
whose interests they represent informally on the PSC.

· The collective leadership feature of the Chinese political system is designed to guard against a
repeat of the excesses of the era of the PRC’s founding father, Mao Zedong, when a single
outsized leader was able to convulse the nation with a series of mass political campaigns. It is
also meant to guard against the emergence in China of a figure like Mikhail Gorbachev, whose
decisions are widely blamed in China for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

b. The Military as an Armed Wing of the Communist Party

· China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), is not a national army belonging to the state.
Rather, it is an armed wing of the Communist Party, with the Party’s exercise of “absolute
leadership” over the military a fundamental guarantee of Communist Party rule. The PLA’s
willingness to put the Communist Party’s interests first was tested in 1989, when the Party
ordered tanks into the streets of Beijing to clear unarmed protestors from Tiananmen Square.
 The PLA did as the Party ordered, killing hundreds of protestors in the process—no authoritative
death toll has ever been released.

· A heavy emphasis on political indoctrination—and particularly on the need for the PLA to be
unswervingly loyal to the Communist Party—has been a hallmark of the PLA from its earliest
days.

· A major tool for Party control of the military is the General Political Department (GPD), one of
the four “general departments” of the PLA headquarters, all of which are represented on the
Party’s Central Military Commission. Among other things, the GPD is responsible for political
training and military personnel matters, including management of personnel dossiers,
promotions, and job assignments. The Political Work Department of the Central Military is the
chief political organ under the Central Military Commission. It was created in January 2016
following the 2015 People's Republic of China military reform. Its predecessor was the People's
Liberation Army General Political Department. The department leads all political and cultural
activities in the People's Liberation Army.

c. The Legislature: Strong on Paper, Weak in Practice

· China’s 1982 state constitution, adopted six years after the death of Mao Zedong, describes the
country’s unicameral legislature, the National People’s Congress, as “the highest organ of state
power.” The constitution gives the NPC the power to amend the constitution; supervise its
enforcement; enact and amend laws; ratify and abrogate treaties; approve the state budget and
plans for national economic and social development; elect and impeach top officials of the state
and judiciary; and supervise the work of the State Council, the State Central Military
Commission, the Supreme People’s Court, and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate. In reality,
however, the NPC exercises many of those powers in name only.

· One major reason for the NPC’s weakness is the Communist Party’s insistence that it serve as
little more than a rubber stamp for Party decisions. While the constitution gives the NPC the
right to “elect” such top state officials as the President, Vice President, and Chairman of the
State Central Military Commission, for example, in practice, the Party decides who will fill those
positions. The NPC’s role is simply to ratify the Party’s decisions.

c. Document-Based Culture

· In the Chinese system, the statements of individual leaders are almost always less authoritative
than documents approved by the collective leadership, with the most authoritative documents
being those approved by the Communist Party Central Committee. A corollary is that the
officially sanctioned published form of a leader’s words is almost always more authoritative than
the words as originally delivered, with the act of publication providing an important stamp of
party approval. Notably, former Premier Wen Jiabao used interviews with the foreign media to
discuss his ideas for political reform, but the Chinese state media never reported the substance
of those interviews, limiting their authority and impact in China. China’s document-based culture
 also includes a heavy reliance on paper documents, even in a digital age, with the circulation of
paper documents, and the accumulation of signatures on them, helping to build consensus.

d. The Importance of Ideology

· Ideology matters more in China than in many other political systems. As the Chinese Communist
Party has sought to adapt itself to a changing world, it has had to wrestle with ways to revise its
ruling ideology to allow the change necessary for its survival, without changing its ideology so
much as to undermine further its already tenuous justifications for maintaining a permanent
monopoly on power. The CCP waged a successful revolution and established the People’s
Republic of China with the promise that it would help farmers and workers overthrow
their“exploiters,” the landlords and capitalists, and establish socialism and ultimately
communism, in which all property would be publicly owned, and all classes would cease to exist.
In its constitution, the Party still officially proclaims the “realization of communism” to be its
“highest ideal and ultimate goal.”

e. The Ideal and Reality of Meritocracy

· An important element of the Communist Party’s bid for ideologically based legitimacy is the
notion that people rise within the Party or State hierarchy based on what the Party constitution
describes as “their moral integrity and their professional competence,” and “on their merits
without regard to their origins.”29 The Party, which manages personnel appointments across the
Chinese political system, the military, and all public institutions, argues that this arrangement
helps make China’s political system superior to the political systems of countries that elect their
leaders in competitive, multi-party elections.

· A detailed 2012 study conducted by scholars in the United States and China found no evidence
of a correlation between rank in the Communist Party hierarchy and success in delivering
“exceptional economic growth”—a strong indicator of professional competence. The authors
did, however, find that the Party awarded promotions based on factional ties, familial ties to
senior leaders, and educational qualifications.30 The children of high-level officials, dubbed
“princelings” (taizi) in colloquial Chinese, are particularly prominent at the highest levels of the
Chinese political system, with four of the seven members of the current Politburo Standing
Committee meeting that description. China’s most prominent princeling is Communist Party
General Secretary Xi Jinping, the son of revered early revolutionary Xi Zhongxun.