The Pleasure of Plenums

a handy guide to that thing you probably haven't heard about.

Somewhere on the distant edge of your current-affairs radar, the faint notion that events of a vaguely political nature are currently underway in China may have begun to emerge as a fuzzy, indistinct blip.

Perhaps you’ve been dimly aware of state premier ‘grandpa’ Wen Jiabao’s delivery of the State Council’s annual report (in a speech lasting well over two hours, Papa Wen spent a good deal of time hurling about the word faith as if he’d just invented it, as he has already done at Davos and elsewhere this year. If this behaviour persists much longer, he’s liable to end up sounding like either Gordon Brown or George Michael, neither of which is particularly seemly for a man with this much social capital).

More likely, you might have picked up on People’s Congress chairman Wu Bangguo’s assertion that China has no plans to adopt western-style parliamentary democracy in the near future (Absolutely No Democracy for China Ever Ever Ever! – BBC; more on this later).

Either way, the news that China’s NPC and NPPCC are busy holding their annual double-plenum is unlikely to inspire much excitement. The bodies occupy a confusing position within China’s dizzyingly complicated government structure (which, in many respects, still serves as little more than a front for a highly centralised authoritarian core). According to the epithet-flinging sages at the Guardian, all this amounts to is yet another meeting of the country’s ‘rubber-stamp parliament’, not worthy of the attention of us parliamentary democratic types.

Though there is an element of truth in this, the horse-trading, jockeying for position, political haggling, and genuine all-out policy debate taking place in the corridors and meeting-rooms of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People is becoming more significant with each passing year, and forms a rare and fascinating window onto the realm of modern Chinese politics in motion.

Here, then, is a pocked guide to the Third Plenum of the 10^th National People’s congress. Let’s start with the warm-up act.

The what? The NPPCC, or National People’s Political Consultative Conference.

Who’s involved? Bizarrely for a one-party state, NPPCC delegates are drawn mainly from the eight parties that make up the body of its ‘united front.’ Though they all toe the party line pretty closely today, the names of one or two belie the ossified remnants of a desperate and often tragic struggle for political compromise that took place in certain quarters following the end of World War II, as the nation slid back towards bloody civil war (the ‘China Democratic League’ spent its early days trying to drum up support for a ‘third way’ between the communists and the nationalists before being hijacked from the left, leaving many of its founding members to bear the full brunt of the political upheavals of the 50s and 60s).

The 2,000 odd delegates are chosen through a non-representative system of proposal and nomination, and include leading academics, professionals, intellectuals, and the occasional popular figure like Olympic hurdling champion Liu Xiang (who managed to stumble off the plane from the states just in time to attend the plenum’s closing ceremony). Broadly speaking, delegates are roughly analogous to the kind of people one might find stocking the majority of the shelves over at the House of Lords.

What is it meant to do? “Political consultation, democratic supervision, and political participation.” Essentially, a mechanism for ordinary citizens to play a direct role in overseeing the legislative activities of their government.

What does it actually do? Not much. NPPCC ‘proposals’ have no way of becoming legislation. Next to the NPC’s sleek ship of state, the NPPCC is a bit like a crazed gondolier, sputtering a host of largely unworkable, often ridiculous, yet occasionally intriguing proposals as he punts alongside. Many of the hundreds of proposals put forward are genuine reflections on current political talking points, allowing delegates to serve as a kind of foil for their colleagues next door at the NPC itself. Some, however, remain wonderfully ludicrous (the pick of this year’s crop include suggestions for everyone to start buying a kind of national costume in a bid to boost ‘patriotic’ consumerism, and a proposal to allow 17-year-olds to take their university entrance exams in classical Chinese).

All of which brings us to the main act…

The what? National People’s Congress.

Who’s involved? Technically speaking, this is the elected representative body of the people of China. NPC delegates are elected by and from a pool of local-level NPC’s, which in turn are elected directly by ordinary citizens. However, this is all slightly academic at the moment since most candidates are party-vetted, the number of competing candidates per seat is tightly controlled (usually about 120 candidates for every 100 seats), and electioneering is illegal.

What is it meant to do? Technically speaking, the NPC is the nation’s highest legislative body, representing the apex of the Chinese ‘state’ power structure (as opposed to the ‘party’ structure, with which it is intertwined). At its annual meetings, it discusses major policy initiatives and ratifies them into law, while its smaller, year-round Standing Committee is responsible for more day-to-day legislation.

What does it actually do? Though there still remains a certain whiff of the ‘rubber-stamp’ about it (China’s 4bn yuan stimulus package flitted by this year with barely a mention), the NPC has become an increasingly politicised body in recent years.

The fact that bills forged by the State Council (headed by Papa Wen, China’s equivalent of a cabinet) usually breeze through the NPC with little opposition at the voting stage often masks the torturous business of hammering out the details that can now take place over the course of events like the annual plenums, (a re-emergent by-product of a deep cultural tendency to try and reach consensus wherever possible).

While everyone involved still professes a fundamental loyalty to the party line, different delegates may hold wildly different opinions about the direction in which the country is headed and how best to get it there. Increasingly, NPC legislation represents not just the original intentions of the country’s leadership clique, but the compromise reached after these differing voices have had their say.

This brings us back to the issue of democratisation (yes, that old chesnut). While Wu Bangguo may have dismissed multi-party democracy out of hand, an increasingly vocal NPC presents intriguing possibilities. There is little doubt on this last point – this morning’s papers contain stories of one NPC delegate suggesting acidly that the body would be more effective if less time were spent on collective self-congratulation and more on discussing legislation, while others have called for greater and earlier transparency of central government proceedings, or full immunity of speech [should appear here later today] to allow for wider-ranging debate – comments that would have been unthinkable a few years back.

The question is where next? An empowered NPC and an overhauled, more competitive electoral system could, if properly handled, end up being every bit as ‘representative’ as many of the world’s supposed democracies. Is a one-party democratic model possible, or will the steering hand of the CCP only become more subtle in its stifling of genuine debate? Check back here in 20 years or so to find out!

Notes on 'Civilization'

Apologies for the delayed post. Living out of a suitcase for 4 weeks deadens the creative impulse somewhat.

It is, as usual, the absence of something that hammers home its importance. Perhaps the Cambodian government has more important targets for its limited funds. Perhaps its political parties are more concerned with squaring off against each other than telling their electorate how they ought to be behaving. Perhaps I should learn Khmer before I start making pronouncements upon far away countries about which I know little. Whichever the case, stepping out of customs and back into Shanghai was a bit like being struck in the head with a propaganda-soaked flannel.

Not that this is an altogether unpleasant experience. While red banners sporting large, aggressive looking yellow characters still abound (though these days they’re as likely to be welcoming in the New Year as anything else), the majority of state propaganda is these days disseminated through much subtler means. Inconspicuous among advertisements for expensive private hospitals and a ‘Harry Potter Magic Academy’ is a picture of an improbably verdant urban scene. “The Civilized City of Nanjing Welcomes You.”

Wenming: Civilized. Civilization. The two are tricky enough terms to get to grips with in English, but a lack of distinction between them in Chinese blurs the issue further. As a consequence, resonance of the word can (and does) extend from the courtyards of the Forbidden City to standing on the correct side of an escalator. Originally a Japanese neologism, it began life closely married to the enlightenment idea of ‘progress.’ Highly-charged, it stood for an outlook that was modernist, pro-western, and largely dismissive of a backward, ‘traditional’ China.

This began to change in the late 70’s as Deng Xiaoping began to realize the necessity of finding at least a token replacement for the ideological structures that had underpinned the régime’s legitimacy during the Mao era in order to help drive his reforms forward. Thirty years on, a revised and rather hazy form of wenming bundles together a whole mass of notions concerned moral conduct, material progress, and critically, a sense of innate Chineseness. With such a diverse range of heavyweight associations, it has the dual advantage of carrying enough importance as to render it almost sacred terminology, while being flexible enough to be pressed into use by pretty much anyone for any purpose.

Despite this vagueness, it now forms the heart of an elegant, almost beautiful architecture of propaganda. In contrast to the ‘thought work’ of the Mao era, through which individuals were exclusively defined through their ties to the state, the modern use of wenming encourages people to make an active claim to their citizenship by a voluntary acting out of certain standards of behaviour.

A perfect illustration of how this works greets the male population of China every time it unzips in public urinals across the country; a small placard placed at eye-level above the porcelain reads thus: “One small step forward to pee, one giant leap for civilization.” Trite as they may appear, such soundbytes forge a direct link between personal actions and the progress of the nation as a whole. In doing so, it ascribes a high level of importance to the voluntary behaviour of each individual, while entirely negating any trace of individualism.

The surprising part is that, perhaps shuddering at the memory of progressive negative campaigns that culminated in the nihilistic black hole of the Cultural Revolution, China’s leaders have chosen to mobilize this set-up in an almost entirely positive manner. Emphasis is placed on the results of contribution, not the consequences of a lack thereof. Though the results of this kind of propaganda are always hard to measure, there has been at the very least been a visible change in public behaviour, even over the past three or four years; queuing is now at least a recognisable phenomenon; metro interchanges are no longer the chaotic, jostling scrums they once were; a growing and almost tangible sense of pride and self-respect hangs in the air like incense.

There is, inevitably, an unpleasant side. The concept of ‘civilisation’ can easily be used as a means to exclude or ostracise groups that somehow fail to conform to the standards it prescribes. A parallel and altogether more distasteful line of propaganda surrounds the notion of suzhi, another ‘keyword’ which roughly translates as ‘quality.’ A person’s quality is dependent on a number of things. These can include innate factors such as breeding or cultural background, as well as acquired elements like education or even nutrition. On this basis, people are said to be of ‘high’ or ‘low’ quality. Though whoever concocted the term may have been able to fantasize about its being no more than a straightforward technical description, in reality it has about as much neutrality as calling someone an ‘uneducated peasant.’ As such, it is frequently used pejoratively in describing groups perceived as inferior, such as migrants, rural inhabitants, ethnic minorities and so on. By implication, a person of high suzhi is much more likely to be a ‘civilized’ one.

Despite this, China’s civilizing programme makes the British government’s attempts at propaganda (if they can even be graced with the term) look thuggish and downright sinister by comparison. Rather than emphasising what kinds of nice things might happen if you do do something, we in the UK prefer an approach that might perhaps be termed ‘old school.’ You think you’ve done nothing wrong, don’t you? Are you sure? Are you positive? You’d better be. You think you can hide, but we know where you are, and we will find you, and then… A quick look at recent campaigns run by the Department for Work and Pensions, the TV Licensing Agency, and the DVLA, to name but a few, suggests that a more ‘civilised’ approach may, perhaps, be in order.