New Chinese Law to Give More Power to Congress

China’s legislature will pass a new law strengthening its constitutionally mandated powers of supervision over the government and judiciary, according to officials attending the annual session of the National People’s Congress, or NPC.

Officials did not give a timetable, but they expressed confidence that the NPC Supervision Law will be passed within the legislature’s current five-year session, which ends in 2003.

On Friday, NPC Chairman Li Peng responded to intensive lobbying for the law by delegates, asserting that the NPC’s “supervision must be given a position equal in importance to legislation.”

He acknowledged that “supervisory work is a weak link in the NPC’s work and needs to be further strengthened.”

Many observers doubt that supervision by the legislature can develop into a Western-style system of checks and balances while the Communist Party continues to control the election of congressional delegates and monopolize power within all branches of government.

However, like village elections and investigative journalism, the People’s Congresses are assuming a vital role at the broad, lower levels of China’s political pyramid.

The congresses combat corruption, oversee law enforcement and respond to complaints and suggestions from the public.

China has 3 million delegates to local legislatures, from the town to the provincial level. They have no law specifying how they should supervise the government, so they have started to improvise.

“In many places, People’s Congresses have begun to experiment with methods like no-confidence votes and impeachment” of government officials, NPC delegate Xu Shanlin told the official China Daily.

Legislators call officials to be questioned, then write formal evaluations of their performance and point out shortcomings that the officials must respond to, Xu said.

In recent years, provincial and municipal legislatures have rejected numerous party nominations for departmental officials, and congress-nominated candidates often beat the party’s nominees in direct local elections.

Roderick MacFarquhar, a China specialist at Harvard University, compares provincial legislatures to the Censorate of China’s Imperial Age. The Censorate, made up mainly of ex-officials, policed the bureaucracy and loyally remonstrated to the throne in cases of government abuses.

In a recent article, MacFarquhar notes that the Heilongjiang provincial legislature forced the provincial government to adjust income projections in its annual budget to meet national guidelines. It also required the government to disclose the amount of extra-budgetary revenue derived from administrative fees--money that often goes for illegal government perks.

At the national level, the NPC began to flex its supervisory muscles last year by sending teams headed by NPC officials into the provinces. The teams investigated the enforcement of laws on agriculture, maritime environmental protection and tax collection.

On paper, China’s Constitution grants the NPC broad powers. The legislature can remove top officials, including the president, vice president, premier, cabinet ministers and the chief judge of the Supreme Court. It also decides on affairs of state, such as budgets and declarations of war.

In reality, the NPC’s 3,000 delegates have never rejected outright any report or piece of legislation handed to it by the party or government, giving the legislature an image as the party’s “rubber stamp.”

Experts say if the party senses legislators’ strong opposition to a particular motion or draft law, they will take it back, rework and resubmit it. The party would rather compromise than risk a vote that might end in unseemly defeat.

“Getting a lot of opposing votes is not a glorious thing,” a legal scholar with the NPC said with a laugh.

Last year, amid a firestorm of criticism over judicial corruption, 40% of NPC delegates voted their disapproval of a report delivered by China’s top prosecutor.

The dissatisfaction of the delegates helped to launch a massive shake-up of the judiciary last year in which hundreds of mistaken court verdicts were overturned, and thousands of corrupt police officers and judges were sacked.