Miscalculating

On February 27, 1957, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong ushered in a brief period of openness for the newly consolidated communist state. His speech, entitled “On the Correct Handling of the Contradictions among the People,” urged other CCP elites to “let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.” Months before, Premier Zhou Enlai had articulated the need for a public voice in policy making, citing unrest in Eastern Europe:

Zhou's reasoning gained the support of Mao, who formally announced the plan in February. The goal was to rid the government of its “three evils” – bureaucratism, sectarianism, and subjectivism – by fostering vigorous societal debate (Doolin 1961; Goldman 1962; MacFarquhar 1974). More open discussion would be good for the Party, and foster unity and loyalty among those yet to embrace its rule.

Mao's call was initially met with suspicion among would-be reformers. After some reassurance, intellectuals, students, and members of nominal democratic opposition parties began speaking their minds. University campuses became centers of reformist campaigns. A group of Peking University students created a “Democracy Wall,” pasting up posters lampooning CCP authority and Mao himself (Goldman 1962). Letters of criticism overwhelmed government and Party offices.

NPC deputies took a prominent role in the movement. They advocated for democratic reforms and an enhanced role for the parliament. Deputy Tan Tiwu demanded Party organs be made subservient committees under the authority of the NPC (O'Brien 1990).

RWB and Institutional Change

The current version of the NPC is a “representation within bounds” parliament. Deputies convey citizen grievances but shy away from sensitive political issues, and the government in turn displays partial responsiveness to their concerns. Deputies are socialized into this behavioral pattern and are punished or rewarded depending on the quality of their representative behavior. They also enjoy substantial rents for their services.

The analysis in this book is focused on a single snapshot in time, the 11th NPC (2008–12) under the Hu-Wen administration. This decision was made largely on the basis of data availability, but it leaves open the question of how the CCP regime arrived at this equilibrium. How has representation in the NPC changed over time? How long has the representation within bounds system been in place, and what precisely spurred its creation? And importantly, can we expect it to continue in the future?

The purpose of this chapter is to explore and explain the historical evolution of the National People's Congress. I will use the ideas from the formal theory in Chapter 2 to aid in the presentation and interpretation of the history. This approach has been referred to as an “analytic narrative” or a “theory guided narrative” (Bates et al. 2000; Buthe 2002; Levi 2002; Capoccia and Kelemen 2007), and it can be helpful in assessing the plausibility of a particular framework and identifying relevant actors and trends (Buthe 2002). In line with rational-choice institutionalism, I ascribe to the view that institutions can be manipulated to meet the ends of different political actors (Shepsle 2006; Pepinsky 2014). I will also draw on concepts developed by proponents of historical institutionalism, particularly the idea that institutional development is often the result of rapid change followed by institutional reproduction (Thelen 1999; Capoccia and Kelemen 2007).

Recall from the model in Chapter 2 that for the Autocrat, the ideal level of representation is a function of the probability of a revolution being successful, π. At extremely low values of π, the Citizen cannot credibly threaten the regime, and there is no need for policy responsiveness. The Autocrat can get away with minimal representation and prefers the Stable Nonresponsive equilibrium E2.1.

Hongyu Online

NPC deputy Zhou Hongyu counts his constituent emails daily. Zhou's personal website – www.hongyu-online.com – was the first of its kind, providing detailed information on his legislative activities. Constituents can read the full text of Zhou's latest opinions and motions, brush up on the details of his personal story, and even contact him with their own ideas. “The Website is receiving an increasing amount of mail from netizens, especially during the annual session of the National People's Congress,” he explains. “This morning when I logged on it, I received 18 mails. At noon, I had another dozen. Just now, I received four more. And it's not over yet” (“NPC Deputy Zhou Hongyu” 2007).

Zhou's website, combined with his passion for the job, has made him something of a super-legislator. In his first two terms in office (2003– 12), Zhou singlehandedly proposed 212 different opinions and motions, addressing issues ranging from the antiquated petition system to rampant employment discrimination. He frequently turns constituent emails into formal proposals, but his personal pet issue is education reform. In 2003, Zhou's first year as a deputy, he put forward a suggestion for instituting free compulsory education in rural areas, but his proposal was later denied by the Ministry of Finance on the grounds of financial unfeasibility. Zhou redoubled his efforts, working with other experts to calculate the cost of the free education program (“Prof a Student” 2011).He raised the proposal again in 2004, this time including a more complete sustainability calculation, and reportedly slipped it into Premier Wen Jiabao's hands during a brief exchange (“NPC Deputy Zhou Hongyu”2007). Two years later, Zhou's opinion became reality in the 2006 Amendment to the Compulsory Education Law, which guaranteed nine years of free compulsory education for children in the countryside.

This diligence has earned Zhou a reputation as one of China's top legislators, and he has quickly risen up the People's Congress hierarchy. He was recently reselected to serve his third NPC term, and he now concurrently serves as deputy director of the Hubei Provincial People's Congress Standing Committee. The state media frequently celebrate his accomplishments with lengthy interviews. Some have fondly labeled him “cannon mouth Zhou” or “the crowing rooster” because he loudly alerts the government to citizen demands.

Summary of Findings

This book began with a set of questions on the nature of representation and legislative institutions in authoritarian systems, and I have sought some preliminary answers through a detailedmicroanalysis of the Chinese case. Authoritarian parliaments, or at least the NPC, can fill an informational role by revealing citizen grievances, but they bring the risk of additional publicity on sensitive political issues. The current CCP regime is trying to engineer a system of representation within bounds using a combination of rents, socialization and career incentives. Deputies themselves are not tone-deaf and seek to convey constituent interests on a broad range of nonsensitive issues. They do so not because of electoral accountability from below, but because of top-down accountability to the regime itself. The net result is a docile but useful parliament, one that conveys public opinion but remains loyal to the CCP on policies core to the oneparty state.

Much of the book is dedicated to testing the observable implications of the framework using new data on the backgrounds and behaviors of NPC deputies. Below is a summary of the core findings. Each empirical chapter roughly corresponds to one outcome measure: influence, representation, selection, and rents.

Influence (Chapter 3)

– Roughly half of randomly selected opinions from the Hainan Provincial People's Congress appear to have a tangible influence on the policy outcomes. There are no proposals in the Hainan dataset that call for political reforms. See Tables 3.1 and 3.2.

– Original public opinion data show that Chinese citizens perceive partial responsiveness in the NPC system. Highly popular policies are perceived as being more likely to be adopted, but not if they propose political reform. See Figure 3.4.

Representation (Chapter 4)

– At the provincial level, publicly available NPC deputy proposals and comments from 2008 to 2012 display congruence with constituent opinion/intensity measures constructed from the 2008 China Survey and demographic variables. See Tables 4.2 and 4.3 and Figure 4.2.

– Shocks to public opinion appear to be met with a legislative response, but not for strong preference issues. See Figures 4.3 and 4.4.

Selection (Chapter 5)

– After matching on demographic and professional characteristics, deputies who are reselected into the 12th NPC have about 20–50% more publicly available proposals than deputies who are not. An additional proposal seems to increase the probability of reselection by about 2%. See Table 5.3.

Tone Deaf?

The nearly 3,000 deputies to China's National People's Congress (NPC) are widely dismissed as little more than cronies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), brought to Beijing each year to warm seats and vote through the legislative initiatives of central leadership. To date, no single bill before the full NPC plenary session in March has ever been voted down, a pattern that has earned the parliament the familiar “rubber stamp” moniker among critics. Reform-minded citizens and scholars dismiss deputy policy proposals as “meaningless” and complain they never do anything “really important” (Personal Interview BJ006). National-level deputies are “elected” by provincial-level congresses, but all candidates first receive nominations from the CCP or other Party-led organizations. Strict limits on the ratio of candidates to seats effectively allow CCP leaders to pick and choose representatives (O'Brien 1988, 1990; Jiang 2003). The deputies themselves hold no campaigns, have little name recognition, and are consistently maligned as “tone-deaf” and unrepresentative of the population at large (Mu 2012). In a recent editorial, Minxin Pei puts it bluntly: “in a fundamental sense, the NPC has little connection with real Chinese society” (Pei 2010).

Conventional wisdom holds democracy to be a necessary condition for meaningful representation. Economic theories of representation assume that in the absence of elections, office holders will protect their own interests and neglect constituent preferences (Becker 1958; Barro 1973, p. 19). Manin (1997) identifies regular elections as one of his four principles of modern representative government. In designing the U.S. House of Representatives, Madison (1788) believed biennial elections were needed for legislators to maintain “an intimate sympathy with the people.” In this view, the supposed tone-deaf nature of the NPC is exactly what we should expect. Chinese representatives have little in the way of electoral accountability, and so there is no reason for them to develop meaningful constituent ties.

Many deputies work to defy their poor reputation. Shanghai deputy Zhu Guoping, for example, conducts investigations of different societal issues to inform her policy proposals. She organizes the local cadres of her area to visit hundreds of families in the neighborhood in order to be “crystal clear on changes in the needs of the people” (Xie 2009).