This month sees the annual sessions of China’s leading advisory and legislative bodies – the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress (NPC). They are a key event in the country’s political calendar where the programme for government is debated and agreed. In this article, Charles McKelvey provides valuable insights into China’s socialist democracy and how it differs from bourgeois democracy.
In the Wikipedia entry on China, there is a section on “Politics of China,” and a subsection on “National People’s Congress.” As is evident from the extensive citations, this subsection on the “National People’s Congress” was written on the basis of the archives and documents of the government of China, including those of the National People’s Congress. It is a straightforward description, revealing the structures through which the Chinese political process favors the power of the people and limits the possibility for control of the decision-making process by the bureaucracy of the Chinese state, a Chinese capitalist class, or foreign capitalist or imperialist interests. At the same, these structures permit the Communist Party of China to control the political process only insofar as the Party has support of a strong majority of the people.
One does not find in the Wikipedia entry on China any correction of supposed misstatements of fact or alleged distorted understandings found in the above-mentioned subsection on the “National People’s Congress.” This is curious, given that the Western intellectuals who disseminate their claim of authoritarianism in China certainly have the means and resources to rectify any errors that appear in the English-language entry on China in Wikipedia. The reason for this curiosity is that Western intellectuals who disseminate the claim of authoritarianism in China (and other states constructing socialism) use a strategy of ignoring the structures of people’s power. They pretend that structures of people’s power do not exist, with the realistic expectation that their audience will not be informed about such structures, thus permitting Western “anti-authoritarian” intellectuals to get away with claims that are contradicted by reality. Rather than refuting particular explanations offered in defense of the structures of people’s power, the strategy of the Western intellectuals is to depend on the deep-seeded and wide tendency to not pay attention to such explanations. They therefore have no response to a fact-based description of the structures and processes of the National People’s Congress in China.
Continue reading Political structures in socialist China
