Sun Chunlan was frightened in Wuhan in March last year, when he met residents of the district shouting “all fake!” upstairs.
The Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) will hold its 28th meeting from April 26 to 29, according to an announcement issued by the Communist Party’s National People’s Congress. This will be the second meeting of the body after it received new authorization to appoint and remove personnel in March. Some analysts believe that there may be individual senior officials at the vice state level being adjusted, with Vice Premier Sun Chunlan being named in a rare case by overseas red media.
According to official sources, on the afternoon of April 16, the meeting of the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of the Communist Party of China decided to hold the 28th meeting of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress at the end of April. In addition to a series of national laws and regulations and diplomatic agreements, the main agenda will also include “consideration of relevant appointments and dismissals”.
According to an April 21 article in Dovetail.com, which is considered a major outreach organization, the NPC Standing Committee is a standing body between sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the Communist Party’s highest authority, and it has just been authorized to make a number of major appointments and removals at the NPC’s March session.
On March 11, the fourth session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) of the Communist Party of China voted, as expected, to amend the Organic Law of the NPC. This amendment to the NPC Organic Law involves what is known as “improving the NPC Standing Committee’s power to appoint and remove personnel,” emphasizing that it will expand the power to appoint and remove the leadership of the State Council. This includes the ability of the NPC Standing Committee to decide on the appointment and removal of Vice Premier and State Councillors of the State Council when the NPC is not in session, as opposed to the past when it was limited to deciding on the appointment and removal of heads of ministries and commissions under the State Council.
In addition, the NPC Standing Committee can also remove “individual members of the Central Military Commission” other than the chairman.
For example, the four vice premiers of the State Council, except for First Vice Premier Han Zheng, who is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, and the other three, Sun Chunlan, Hu Chunhua and Liu He, are all members of the Politburo; Xu Qiliang and Zhang Ruoyan, both vice chairmen of the Central Military Commission, are also members of the Politburo.
The new mandate is seen by outsiders as a way for Beijing authorities to avoid the annual plenary session of the NPC more frequently and decide on the appointment and removal of the aforementioned senior officials through the NPC Standing Committee, which meets basically every two months.
This is because the NPC Standing Committee is currently in the hands of Xi’s hard-core Li Zhanshu, and Xi’s other hard-core Wang Chen is the top-ranking NPC vice chairman. Previously, some saw Xi’s push to amend the NPC’s organic law to simplify the mandate of top leaders as a power-cutting, or hollowing out, of Xi Jinping against current Premier Li Keqiang. Others see it as a possible ouster of Vice Premier Hu Chunhua, who is not one of Xi’s own, but others see it mainly as a way for Xi to lay out the groundwork for his next re-election.
A previous article in Dovetail analyzed that the year-long period leading up to the 20th Communist Party Congress could be unusual for Beijing. There is reason to believe that, following issue-oriented logic, since Beijing has chosen to make this change, there is a real possibility of using this mandate. And since the first meeting of the NPC Standing Committee since the NPC Organization Act came into force, the 27th, was a “temporary addition” to deal with Hong Kong’s electoral system, this late April meeting of the NPC Standing Committee may be a more appropriate time to use the personnel mandate for the first time.
The article also makes the rare point that in early April, Ding Xiangyang (1959), the deputy secretary-general of the State Council responsible for safeguarding Sun Chunlan, suddenly retired at an advanced age, which was “seen as a signal”.
The article does not elaborate further, but according to past official practice, a change in the first secretary is often a precursor to a change in the leader he serves.
Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan was born in May 1950 and is now approaching the age of 71.
Born as a woman worker, Sun Chunlan, a current Politburo member who has been questioned for her incompetence, was once reported for her daughter’s alleged corruption, and had a tangled relationship with Bo Xilai, who was Sun’s predecessor when she served in Dalian. But that didn’t stop her from being re-elected at the 18th Communist Party Congress. Sun Chunlan ranks second among the current vice premiers, after Han Zheng.
On March 5 last year, during a visit to the epidemic-hit Wuhan, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan was met by citizens shouting “fake, fake, fake” during a visit to the Cuiyuan Mansion neighborhood in Wuhan’s Qingshan District, expressing their dissatisfaction with the authorities’ fake fight against the epidemic and their real efforts to maintain stability. The video is rapidly fermenting on the internet.
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