In the current political climate where “no delusion” is the norm and conviction for speech is the norm, there are only a few NPC deputies and CPPCC members who dare to break out of their “rubber stamp” and “political vase” roles, according to a March 7 article by Voice of America. There are only a handful of NPC deputies and CPPCC members who dare to break out of their roles as “rubber stamps” and “political vases”, and there are about the following.
The first few are related to the proposal to require Communist Party officials to disclose their assets, known as the “sunshine bill.
Wang Quanjie, a professor at Yantai University, proposed to change the property declaration system of officials to a public property disclosure system at the National People’s Congress in 2005, but he was only a delegate to the National People’s Congress for one term; Han Deyun, president of the Chongqing Lawyers Association, has proposed legislation on the property declaration and disclosure system of civil servants to the National People’s Congress almost every year since 2006, and the response from the relevant parties was “The conditions are not yet ripe for enacting a property declaration law” until March 2014 when Han Deyun tweeted, “I’m sure I won’t mention proposals on official property disclosure this year. The difficulty of establishing an official property disclosure system is ten times more difficult than what I thought when I first suggested it…” Jiang Hong, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party‘s National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and said in 2014, “I will continue to propose a public system for declaring the property of officials this year.
To make matters worse, Xu Zhiyong, a doctor of law who served two terms as a deputy to the Communist Party’s National People’s Congress in Beijing‘s Haidian District, was jailed for several years for promoting official property disclosure.
Yao, known as a “civil election expert,” has run for the Qianjiang Municipal People’s Congress four times in a row since 1987, and was finally elected as an independent candidate in 1998. During his term of office, he investigated the 100 million yuan white note incident of teachers’ salary in Jingzhou, Xiantao and Tianmen cities in Hubei, paid attention to the illegal replacement of village officials and impeached the director of the Civil Affairs Bureau, which attracted a lot of attention, and supervised the work of the local government and the two houses, and criticized and corrected the illegal and disorderly behavior of unscrupulous officials, but Yao lost in the general election in November 2003.
Not only that, Yao was violently and repeatedly forced to disappear by the authorities in the following years because of his concern for sensitive topics such as human rights and the election system. In 2011, he was abducted by police for writing an election manual and trying to train citizens to run as independent candidates. Afterwards he told Deutsche Welle, “China is a large country with a large population, and if the people do not have the right to formally vote, the government of power will not have legitimacy, and it is impossible for a large country of more than 1.3 billion people to develop peacefully with an illegal government in power.”
Yao Xiurong, a worker in Jiaozuo City, Henan Province, was accidentally appointed by local authorities as a deputy to the NPC in 1993, and after three terms as a hand-raising machine, she began to speak out, once attracting media attention in a breakout session for speaking about the burden on farmers and judicial injustice. In 2003, she was “unsuccessful” in her bid to be elected to the provincial NPC. Recently, Yao told the Voice of America that “the authorities have a very heavy control over her. The criticism she has made has irritated officials in both houses.”
In stark contrast to the aforementioned refusal to be a political vase is Shen Jilan, a delegate to the Communist Party’s National People’s Congress introduced by Shanxi Province. This Voice of America report does not forget to introduce this “fossilized” “hand-raising machine” – from the first NPC session for a total of 66 consecutive years, Shen Jilan attended every year, in between the political In the middle of the political struggle, Shen Jilan has caused great disasters for the people, but during the 2010 session of the National People’s Congress, Shen Jilan openly admitted: “To be a deputy is to listen to the Party, and I have never voted against it.”
Gao Yu, a senior columnist in Beijing, pointed out in late February that “those who really dared to voice their criticism, starting with Wu Zuguang and continuing to many delegates, and at the Time, Wen Yuankai, were eliminated long ago. Now this crop of censorship, some of the past red two generations almost all kicked out. This way he has better control over the two sessions. The two sessions are now basically singing the praises of the children, the vote by show of hands. Everyone is fast becoming Shen Jilan, just by raising their hands.”
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