China’s leadership sessions: decisions, political theater and at times ‘outrageous speech’

In the Chinese capital, Beijing, it’s that time of year again: a time of motorcade-induced traffic jams, stepped-up security, and round-the-clock coverage of dour-faced, dark-suited political representatives discussing — and often fawning over — the policy guidelines of their superiors.

On Thursday, the city kicked off its biggest political event of the year: the “two sessions,” named after the concurrent meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC), a rubber-stamp parliament, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). The sessions will last up to two weeks.

Security was tight at the CPPCC’s opening ceremony at the Great Hall of the People, a massive granite edifice abutting Tiananmen Square. Some guards examined sewer grates with long sticks, checking for suspicious objects; some wielded metal detectors; and some held fire extinguishers to guard against possible self-immolations. Inside, the CPPCC’s top official Yu Zhengsheng delivered a “work report” to more than 2,000 delegates.

The NPC will begin Saturday.

Above all, the meetings are a well-choreographed display of political theater, in which all major decisions are preordained. That’s why ordinary Chinese observers tend to focus less on the meetings’ political machinery than on occasional slip-ups that put a crack in the facade, exposing the human — and thus, fallible — nature of China’s most powerful figures.

Internet users have coined the term leiren yulu, or “outrageous speech” to describe delegates’ most controversial comments. Here are some of the best (and worst), dating to 2011:

2016

On the first day of the CPPCC, Li Xiusong, a delegate from Anhui province, said China should refrain from building Disneyland theme parks, as they embody “Western culture” and may inhibit Chinese children from embracing their own heritage. (Shanghai Disneyland, the first on the mainland, is set to open in June.)

“If children will pursue Western culture when they are young, they will like Western culture when they grow up,” he said, according to several Chinese news websites. “Hence, they will become uninterested in Chinese culture.”

Li made no mention of the countless Hollywood movies, McDonald’s restaurants, and Apple products that now define daily life in most Chinese cities.

2015

Liu Jian, a major general in the People’s Liberation Army and delegate to the CPPCC, suggested that China should host a military parade every year, bucking the traditional schedule of once a decade.

Anyone who experienced President Xi Jinping’s massive military parade in September 2015 might think twice at the prospect — in preparation, authorities locked down parts of Beijing, ratcheted up media and Internet censorship, and temporarily shuttered 12,000 factories and power plants across northern China, resulting in untold economic losses.

2014

Officials at two sessions news conferences generally ignore foreign journalists in favor of state media reporters, whom they trust to ask easy, even flattering questions. So perhaps the biggest scandal at that year’s NPC came when finance officials called on eight Chinese journalists — and then Australian Louise Kenney, who introduced herself as a reporter from “Australia’s Global CAMG” before asking a question about China’s agricultural insurance market. The organization, it turns out, is actually affiliated with China Radio International, a state-run broadcaster. (“Foreign shill,” one Chinese journalist muttered at the presser, according to the Wall Street Journal.)

2013

Chen Guangbiao, a wealthy businessman and CPPCC delegate, has built a reputation in China for orchestrating “philanthropic” and environmentalist stunts such as distributing canned air in Beijing, indiscriminately handing out bundles of cash, and in 2014, attempting to acquire the New York Times.

At the 2013 meetings, his words alone were enough to make headlines. “People who have not received nine years of compulsory education should not have kids; those who have received high school education should be allowed to have one kid; and all those above should not face any restrictions,” he reportedly said.

Chen also proposed creating a National Food Saving Day on which people all over the country would “starve for one day” to “recall the bitter past and think of the sweet present.”

2012

Shen Jilan — now 86, making her the oldest representative at the NPC — unintentionally illustrated the delegates’ lopsided relationship with their superiors in 2009 by proudly proclaiming that she had never voted “no” in a meeting since she first became a delegate in 1954.

In 2012, she once again raised hackles for championing stricter government control of the Internet. “I think someone should administer the Internet just like the People’s Daily,” she said, referring to the Communist Party mouthpiece. “The Internet cannot be administered by just anyone … We should follow our own principles and avoid turning something good to something bad; we should not allow people to say whatever they want. This is a socialist state led by the Chinese Communist Party.”

2011

Wang Ping, a CPPCC committee member, proposed that the government discourage children in China’s rural areas from attending college. “That is because once children from rural areas attend college, they will be unable to return to their hometowns,” he said. “Furthermore, there are severe employment pressures in the cities. There is no possible way that rural kids who are cramped into these cities can be happy.”

China’s urban-rural divide is one of the world’s most striking — on average, rural people earn about a third as much as their urban counterparts (about $1,603 per year compared to $4,490), the state-run China Daily reported in 2015.

Times staff writer Julie Makinen and special correspondents Chuan Xu and Yingzhi Yang in The Times’ Beijing bureau contributed to this report.