Changhao Wei

As always, China’s “Two Sessions” – the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) – convened in Beijing in early March. This year’s NPC session was particularly notable for finishing up the leadership transition that began with last year’s National Party Congress: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) posts were filled in October 2022, but the state positions (including president, premier, and vice president) had to wait until March 2023.

While Chinese state media make a point of promoting the Two Sessions each year, the reaction from abroad is largely bemused. The NPC, in particular, is often dismissed as a meaningless “rubber-stamp legislature” with little real power. Most of the international focus is on the declarations made by other actors (including the premier) in press conferences and work reports, rather than the workings of the NPC itself.

To better understand the NPC and its role in China’s politics in the Xi era, The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi spokes to Changhao Wei, an associate research scholar in law and a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Wei, who also founded and manages the NPC Observer website, explains that “the full NPC’s failure to ever vote down any bill, work report, or nomination” – its “rubber-stamp” reputation – does not negate “the importance of its delegates’ meaningful representation of citizen interests on a range of nonsensitive issues” or “the more active and stronger roles” of other NPC bodies.

The National People’s Congress is often described in media shorthand as “China’s rubber-stamp legislature.” What happens at the NPC’s annual session each year?

The NPC’s annual sessions serve three key purposes. They, first of all, function as the occasion for the NPC to exercise its legal prerogatives as the “highest organ of state power.” Each year, it reviews the central government’s annual budget and plan for China’s social and economic development, and also hears the work reports of its Standing Committee, the State Council, and top judicial authorities. The NPC has also been reviewing important legislation annually since 2015.

What attracts global attention to NPC sessions, however, is not so much the NPC’s authority per se as the platform it offers other state institutions. Through the documents they submit to the NPC, those institutions publicly report on their past year’s work and announce their goals and priorities for the coming year. NPC sessions also used to be the only time of the year when the public could hear directly from an array of high-ranking government officials (the number of press conferences has declined sharply since the pandemic began, however).

Finally, NPC sessions give thousands of delegates an annual window to propose legislation and policy measures. The full NPC’s failure to ever vote down any bill, work report, or nomination belies the importance of its delegates’ meaningful representation of citizen interests on a range of nonsensitive issues. Nor does it reflect the more active and stronger roles its Standing Committee and other subordinate bodies play in China’s political system.

Besides the NPC’s annual session, the Standing Committee meets regularly throughout the year. What’s the relationship between the Standing Committee and the NPC – and should we all be paying more attention to the lower-profile Standing Committee meetings?

The NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) is a more elite body of 175 members elected by each NPC from among the delegates. On paper, it has lesser (though still substantial) powers than the NPC and accepts the latter’s oversight, but in practice, the NPCSC’s role in China’s legal system far outshines the NPC’s.

Take lawmaking first: Over the past decade, the NPCSC has pumped out an average of almost 25 pieces of legislation per year, compared to an average of two enacted by the NPC. In fact, the NPCSC adopted almost 90 percent of all laws on the books, including all recent data and national security legislation that has captured international attention.

When it comes oversight, too, the NPCSC is far more active: It routinely hears work reports by administrative or judicial authorities on specific matters. An overlooked authoritative source of information, those reports often describe existing official policies and practices concerning particular issues, their shortcomings, and the authorities’ plan to address them.

Finally, some of the NPCSC’s subordinate bodies play increasingly important roles in Chinese governance. Its Legislative Affairs Commission, for instance, enforces the supremacy of the Constitution and national laws over lower-level norms, such as local legislation.

In sum, the NPCSC is where the action is, and it is more representative of the entire NPC apparatus’ role in Chinese governance.

One of the big events at this year’s session was the confirmation of Li Qiang as new premier, though his selection was tipped back at the 20th Party Congress. How does China actually go about appointing the premier, and how does this intersect with decisions already made by the CCP leadership?

The de jure process for nominating and appointing the premier is brief and simple. After a new NPC has elected a new PRC president (typically at a morning session), the new president will, without much delay, announce a nominee for the premiership on the same day. The NPC delegates will then spend the afternoon deliberating the choice, before voting on the nomination the next morning. After the ballots are counted and the nomination approved, the president will sign an order to formally appoint the premier, who will then publicly take the constitutional oath and assume office.

In practice, however, the CCP leadership ultimately decides whom to nominate. Its vetting and selection of a new slate of state leaders, including the premier, start much earlier and run in tandem with the party’s preparation for its own quinquennial leadership transition (which most recently occurred in fall 2022).

For the just completed cycle, the party began the process in as early as spring 2022, according to an official account. The process involved multiple rounds of consultation with high-ranking party members, repeated discussions among party leaders themselves, pro forma consultation with non-CCP groups, in addition to anti-corruption and political review of potential candidates. The nominee for the premier, after having been approved by the Politburo and its Standing Committee, requires further endorsement by the full Central Committee (Li Qiang’s nomination was greenlit by the 20th Central Committee’s second plenum in February).

During the ensuing NPC session, the newly elected president will nominate the individual already decided upon by the party.

Since Xi Jinping came to power, there has been a general trend toward strengthening the party at the expense of the state. Has the NPC’s role in China’s governance shifted under Xi?

The party undeniably has a larger-than-ever presence in the NPC’s work, most visibly in lawmaking. As a matter of both rhetoric and practice, the party’s leadership has become more prominent under Xi. The NPC has been proactively fashioning its agenda to more closely follow the party’s priorities, including Xi’s personal directives; the party has reinforced the requirement that the NPC seek its instructions on major issues in lawmaking; and various party entities (all led by Xi) have also sometimes reviewed select draft laws directly.

As Xi reiterated in a key speech from October 2021 on the people’s congress system, the NPC should foremost be a “political organ” that “consciously” upholds the party’s leadership.

That sort of party-NPC dynamic has, in my view, contributed to a stronger NPC vis-à-vis other state institutions. NPC bodies have been drafting more important legislation themselves, while getting involved in other governmental bodies’ drafting processes early on to shape draft laws from the very start. Recent official documents have also emphasized the “gatekeeping” function of legislative deliberations to ensure the quality of legislation.

As for oversight, the NPCSC under Xi has imposed additional reporting obligations on other state institutions (the State Council, in particular), been engaged in more rigorous follow-up oversight, and continued holding a handful of “special inquiries” (China’s equivalent of parliamentary oversight hearings) each year to question government officials on issues of political salience or public concern.

Of course, the goal of enhancing the NPC’s legislative and oversight capacity, in the end, is to make it a more effective agent of and proxy for the party, so that it can efficiently implement the party’s decisions and ensure that other state institutions do the same.

Shortly after the “Two Sessions” ended, the State Council and CCP Central Committee issued a new “Plan to Reform Party and State Institutions.” What reforms are in store for the National People’s Congress?

Under the plan, the NPCSC will set up a new Delegate Affairs Commission to assist with its so-called “delegates work.” Such work primarily refers to activities carried out by the NPCSC, its members and staff, and the NPC’s special committees to support ordinary NPC delegates’ discharge of their duties. Those activities include keeping the delegates in frequent contact with NPCSC members (including the leadership), involving them in the NPCSC’s and special committees’ legislative and oversight work, ensuring that their proposals are carefully studied and addressed by the relevant state organs, and providing them with on-the-job training. Delegates work also involves, to a lesser extent, the NPCSC’s supervision of the delegates, such as reviewing the qualifications of newly elected delegates and keeping files on their performance.

It appears that the new commission, expected to be a ministerial-level agency, will play a centralized role in providing administrative support for most, if not all, aspects of the NPCSC’s delegates work. Its establishment comes as the last NPCSC implemented a series of reforms that, as a matter of internal practice, elevated delegates work to the same status as lawmaking and oversight. The new agency will further cement delegates work as one of the three key pillars of the NPCSC’s activities at the organizational level, underscoring the crucial role that the NPC delegates continue to play in China’s governance by conveying citizen preferences on politically nonsensitive issues to central policymakers.