“No”, “No”, “No”. Xi Jinping: “Passed!” (Applause)
This is a live recording of a vote on a show of hands to amend the party constitution at the 19th Communist Party Congress in late October 2017 when no one expressed opposition or abstained.
After more than four months, more than 2,900 Chinese National People’s Congress deputies re-elected Xi Jinping, the sole candidate, with a unanimous vote in a tie-breaking election for the presidency. And when it came to the vote on the constitutional amendment to abolish term limits for the president and vice presidents, the results were near perfect: out of nearly 3,000 deputies, only two voted against, three abstained, and there was one invalid vote.
The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China stipulates that the NPC is the highest authority of the state. But as we all know, in practice, this people’s congress has been controlled by the Communist Party of China, which leads everything, especially since “the leadership of the Communist Party of China” was written into the text of the constitution three years ago, and some commentators have described the role of the NPC as more regressive than a “rubber stamp.
In the current political climate, where conviction for words, literal prison has become the norm and “no delusion” is allowed, the NPC dares to break away from its role as a “rubber stamp” and a “political vase” and refuses to be a “hand-raising machine. The NPC deputies and CPPCC members who are willing to break away from the role of “rubber stamp” and “political vase” and refuse to be “hand-raising machines” and speak the truth for the people are rare, and once they appear, they are bound to receive media attention and even go down in history.
Sunshine bill is difficult to produce
Since China’s reform and opening up, there have been numerous cases of officials using their power for personal gain and corruption. The sunshine bill, a powerful tool against corruption, and the establishment of a system of public disclosure of officials’ property have become a strong public expectation. in January 2013, the Communist Party’s party media, People’s Daily Online, issued an article acknowledging that “the demand for disclosure of officials’ property has become a social consensus.”
Wang Quanjie, a professor at Yantai University, was one of the first deputies to the National People’s Congress to propose replacing the property declaration system with a public disclosure system for officials, and in 2005, his proposal to “develop a property disclosure system for government leaders” was supported by more than 50 deputies and was submitted to the General Assembly as a bill.
Wikipedia comments that in China, “NPC deputies are appointed by officials, not elected by the people. Therefore, most NPC deputies do not speak from the standpoint of the public. Wang Quanjie, however, is a NPC deputy and uses this position to speak for the public, which is naturally supported and welcomed by the Chinese public.” However, Wang Quanjie, who received public support, served only one term as a NPC deputy.
According to Chinese media reports, Wang Quanjie is still concerned about the topic after his tenure as a 10th NPC deputy has ended. He also has a wish that his “proposal to change the income declaration system of officials to a system of property disclosure,” which he revised again, would be supported by his re-election to the NPC.
Another NPC deputy, Han Deyun, president of the Chongqing Lawyers Association, is famous for his “hard work” on the official property disclosure system.
Since 2006, Han has proposed to the NPC almost every year during the two sessions of the National People’s Congress a legislative proposal for a system of property declaration and disclosure for civil servants. The response to the officials’ property declaration and disclosure proposals was that “the conditions are not yet ripe for the enactment of a property declaration law” and that “legislative proposals will be submitted to the NPC in due course.
In March 2014, the NPC deputy, who studied in the United States, tweeted, “I’m sure I won’t mention the proposal on official property disclosure this year. The difficulty of establishing an official property disclosure system is ten times more than what was imagined when the proposal was first made, a hundred times, and even if it is done on a pilot basis from newly appointed officials, it would be progress if it is done.”
Han Deyun, who shelved his demand for public disclosure of officials’ property, is currently a deputy to the 13th National People’s Congress. The 59-year-old has been the president of Chongqing Lawyers Association and director of Chongqing Sotong Law Firm for many years.
The proposal for a “sunshine bill” also resonated with a CPPCC member.
Jiang Hong, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, said in 2014, “I will continue to propose a public system for declaring the property of officials this year. It will put the proposal in the ‘package’ of anti-corruption proposals.” But this bill has not been followed so far. Not only that, Xu Zhiyong, a doctor of law who served two terms as a deputy to Beijing‘s Haidian District People’s Congress, and others have been jailed for several years for pushing for public disclosure of officials’ property. Xu was also arrested last year on charges of “illegal assembly.
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily’s Global Times, has expressed concern that China would be in turmoil if officials’ assets were made public. In response, Hu Jia, a Chinese human rights activist and recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights, commented, “Hu Xijin knows very well the extent of corruption among Chinese officials at all levels, so he is talking about social unrest, even if the assets of officials above the section level are in the tens of millions. To the division level may be the unit of measurement of property in billions. This if really end out in the open, the people will explode.”
Currently Xinjiang Altay, Zhejiang Cixi, Hunan Liuyang, Ningxia Yinchuan and Qingtongxia in mainland China are listed as pilot sites for official property disclosure, but the results of the disclosures have all resulted in zero complaints and zero objections, far from achieving the effect of anti-corruption and contrary to public expectations.
In November 2012, Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping declared at the beginning of his tenure that “to beat iron, we need to harden ourselves.”
Seven years later, retired Peking University professor Zheng Yefu suggested that the top seven Standing Committee members of the CCP should take the lead in disclosing their assets.
Over the years, the international media have periodically broken the news that families of senior Chinese officials have hidden large amounts of wealth overseas. Netizen “Ai Jing” said: “must be thoroughly public property to the community, otherwise do not be an official, public property to make the corrupt officials unstable, Xinjiang Altai’s pilot has little meaning, is a formality, public property from the highest level to do.” Some netizens also said that if the sunshine bill was introduced early, there would not be such a huge corruption as Lai Xiaomin.
Yao Xiurong: “Civilian bag of justice” reduced to petitioners
“If you don’t do your job for the people, you might as well go Home and sell sweet potatoes.” Xi Jinping, the Communist Party’s general secretary, quoted this classic saying from the opera “The Seventh Rank Sesame Official” when he spoke to the Communist Party’s Central Party School in 2010 before taking the top spot.
In March 1993, instead of becoming an official, Yao Xiurong, a model worker from Jiaozuo City in Henan Province, was unexpectedly appointed by local authorities as a deputy to the National People’s Congress. Yao Xiurong is a competent NPC deputy, Yao Legislative, a former deputy from Qianjiang City, Hubei Province, told the Voice of America. “There are still people who are willing to speak for the people and even ask for their lives.” Yao Legislative said. “Yao Xiurong, a NPC deputy from Jiaozuo, Henan Province, I think she is a very low-key and willing to do her job as a deputy.
In fact, Yao Xiurong was initially a dumb delegate for three years before she shot up. The South Wind Magazine reported: Yao Xiurong’s sense of responsibility awakened after the first speech in the group meeting said: “Now the leaders go to visit, are police escort, reporters report, a scenery, vast, in fact, a little bit of the real situation can not hear, and also labor and money!
Yao Xiurong went on to talk about the burden on farmers, about the problem of judicial injustice, about how they are representatives of the “night inspection of police stations”, how to supervise the correction of wrongful …… cases for 45 minutes in one breath, the delegates have applauded.
According to reports, the then secretary of the Henan Provincial Party Committee, Li Changchun, also applauded her and said to the secretary general of the Henan Provincial People’s Congress: “The next session of Henan will also report Yao Xiurong as a representative of the National People’s Congress. Delegates like her are not more, but less!”
The report said that Yao Xiurong directly approached Li Changchun and asked for her to be a NPC deputy in the next session. In 1998, Yao Xiurong was elected to the Ninth National People’s Congress.
Although this worker is not elected by the people, but she is not afraid of the power, she led a seven-member group of NPC deputies from Henan Province and Jiaozuo City, and did many practical things for the common people, “so that law enforcement agencies remember the supervision of the NPC”, known as ” The people’s bag of justice”, “civilian Qingtian”, but also therefore offended the bureaucratic interests.
In 2003, she was unexpectedly defeated in the differential election for the 10th National People’s Congress of Henan Province. According to the South Wind Window, Yao Xiurong recalled that on January 16, 2003, during the provincial people’s congress, several provincial deputies called her, saying that some delegations had activities at the meeting and would not elect her.
Yao Xiurong lost the election and went to the NPC Liaison Bureau in Beijing to reflect the situation. During her stay in Beijing, she was questioned by the police and learned that she had been designated as a “petitioner. On the eve of the opening of the 10th session of the NPC that year, several police officers from the Jiaozuo City Procuratorate put Yao Xiurong in a car and took her on a trip to the northwest of the country for 18 days before sending her home. According to reports, after losing the election to the National People’s Congress, someone went to the factory to investigate Yao’s financial problems.
The Voice of America tried to contact Yao Xiurong, but her cell phone was turned off.
Yao legislated: “The authorities have heavy control over her. She made criticisms that annoyed officials in the first and second houses.” As to whether Yao Xiurong later ran as an independent candidate for the NPC, Yao Legislation replied with a bitter smile that that was all he could say.
Yao Legislation: the saga of a NPC deputy’s political participation
Yao, an educator, was the first self-nominated NPC deputy in China to run as an individual non-partisan candidate since 1988, and has devoted himself to the struggle for democracy by exposing the lawlessness of the grassroots government on many public occasions. he ran for the Qianjiang Municipal People’s Congress four times in a row since 1987, and was finally elected with a high vote in 1998, serving as a Qianjiang Municipal People’s Congress deputy for five years. During his tenure, he pursued the 100 million yuan white slip incident of teachers’ salaries in Jingzhou, Xiantao and Tianmen cities in Hubei, paid attention to the illegal removal of village officials and impeached the director of the Civil Affairs Bureau, which attracted a lot of attention, and monitored the work of the local one and two houses of government, and criticized and corrected the illegal and disorderly behavior of unscrupulous officials, but Yao Legislation was defeated in the general election in November 2003.
Although Yao served only one term as a NPC deputy, his previous success as an independent candidate has inspired a number of people in many parts of China who are interested in advocating for the people and monitoring the government, officials and law enforcement agencies to run for grassroots people’s representatives. However, almost all citizens who ran as independent candidates in various places have been wiped out or even brutally suppressed, imprisoned or disappeared, such as activists Liu Ping, Wei Zhongping and Li Sihua in Pingxiang, Jiangxi; Beijing human rights activist Nao Jinghuan; and retired Shandong University professor Sun Wenguang.
In September 2004, Yao accepted an invitation from the U.S. State Department to observe the U.S. presidential election. His story and saga of political participation received wide attention from Chinese and foreign media, and was written into a book by former CCTV reporter Zhu Ling, which was successfully published in October 2006. The book, I Oppose: The Saga of a NPC Deputy’s Political Participation, was later banned from reprinting by the Ministry of Propaganda.
In February 2011, Yao was placed under residential surveillance and has since been restricted in his personal freedom by the school where he works at every sensitive Time.
In the early morning hours of July 4, 2011, Yao risked his Life by jumping off a building to escape his illegal house arrest. The school authorities and police searched the school, followed his wife closely, and installed several new cameras in his home. Yao was later forcibly taken away by a group of plainclothes officers at a friend’s house in Beijing.
Asked if the authorities are still monitoring him, Yao said, “Surveillance is an invisible hand. Especially now that we use cell phones, it is very easy to track and locate. For me, it is demanding and pressured. Our whole society, you just raise your opinion to the government, especially raised very sharp, they do not want to change, or can not change for a while, they will take this (the person who raised the opinion) as the object of control.”
Wu Qing: the pro-people representative that officials don’t like
On March 5, 1984, Wu Qing, an English teacher at Beiwai who had just returned from a visit to the United States, gladly accepted the nomination of the party committee of the institute and was elected for the first time as a representative of the Haidian District People’s Congress. Her mother, the Writer Bing Xin, had been a deputy to the National People’s Congress. After Wu Qing was elected to the district NPC, Bing Xin gave her a copy of the 1982 edition of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. Wu Qing has always used the power granted by the Constitution as a district and city NPC representative to actively defend the rights of her constituents.
In 1984, Wu Qing became the first NPC deputy in China to set up a “People’s Representative Reception Day” every Tuesday afternoon.
In 1989, she was elected as a deputy to the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress by a “joint election of ten people” by the Haidian District People’s Congress. Since then, she has been a deputy to the Haidian District People’s Congress and the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress for several terms.
In 2001, at the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress, Wu Qing, together with 46 deputies, questioned the leadership of the Beijing High People’s Court for overstepping its authority and interfering with the enforcement of the Haidian District Court, which was called the “boldest move” by the media.
Wu Qing is not in favor of government officials being “NPC deputies”. She believes that government officials should be supervised, and not be both “athletes” and “referees”. She has voted against the election of the Bureau of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress.
In a 2011 telephone interview with Voice of America correspondent Zhang Nan, Wu Qing said, “This is a real initiative of the people, that is, the responsibility of the citizens. Here. Because the existing NPC deputies, some of them are appointed by the leaders, he is ‘Goethean’ in the meeting, he is not good at representing the masses, he simply does not go to the representative to raise opinions and ask the government how to be open and fair. That’s not the same.”
According to information from Baidu’s encyclopedia, Wu Qing was explicitly prevented from being nominated by the head of the local party apparatus when she fought for the fourth Beijing Municipal People’s Congress election in 2004, and in 2011, Haidian District also did not allow her to continue her re-election as a district-level deputy.
It is understood that Liu Qi, then secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, did not like Wu Qing, who took her democratic oversight duties seriously, and that may have been a major reason why Wu Qing could not continue to serve as a city and district deputy. And the English professor, who had spared no effort in teaching, was scheduled for early retirement by Beijng before she was 65. Her cell phone was once monitored.
Talking about the reason why Wu Qing was cynically hated by the officials, Yao Legislation, a former deputy of Qianjiang Municipal People’s Congress, said, “Concern for the society, especially for the bottom of the society. Then there is the opinion to government officials, and so on and so forth. And her Family background is rather special, and I think those officials in Beijing almost don’t like her.”
Focusing on rural women’s enlightenment work, Wu Qing is active in the Chinese women’s rights movement and is also a board member of the International Women’s Foundation. Wu Qing also founded the Rural Women’s Education Development Fund and is the director of the Farmgirl Cultural Development Center. This Beijing-based NGO center was founded in 1993, when Bing Xin was still alive.
Shen Jilan: a “fossil-level” “hand-raising machine”
Shen Jilan, a rural female laborer designated by Shanxi Province as a deputy to the National People’s Congress, served a total of 66 years from the first Chinese National People’s Congress until her death last year after attending the two sessions.
The clause of “equal pay for equal work” in the first constitution of the People’s Republic of China adopted in 1954 was written on the initiative of Shen Jilan.
From the first session of the National People’s Congress to the 13th session, Shen Jilan attended every year. In between, the tide of political struggle was up and down and unpredictable, causing great havoc to the people.
During the two sessions in 2010, Shen Jilan openly admitted: “To be a representative is to listen to the party, and I have never voted against it.” Shen Jilan, who has been promoted to a bureau-level cadre, said that she does not communicate with her constituents and that it is not appropriate to communicate with them.
She was awarded the Order of the Republic by Xi Jinping on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 2019. Some netizens jokingly called her a national treasure “hand-raising machine”
Gao Yu, a senior columnist in Beijing, pointed out that “the two sessions now are basically singing praises, and everyone is becoming like Shen Jilan, just by raising their hands.”
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