Russell Leigh Moses
The Wall Street Journal
March 16, 2015
China’s annual legislative sessions are rarely thrilling. With many major political decisions made behind closed doors before delegates have even booked their tickets for Beijing, the gathering of the country’s parliament and its top advisory body is sometimes more noteworthy for its photos of leaping hostesses than for any policy deliberations.
Even by that low standard, this year’s edition, which concluded on Sunday with a press conference held by Premier Li Keqiang, was noticeably lackluster.
In one sense, the dullness was intentional. The late-running karaoke sessions, elaborate gift exchanges and exuberant flower arrangements that characterized previous conclaves were all banned this year – an attempt to give the gathering a gravitas that had been largely absent in previous years.
But the failure of China’s legislators to sign off on more than a smattering of forward-looking proposals indicates a worrying paralysis on the part of Beijing in the face of two unfamiliar problems.
The first predicament is China’s faltering economy. During his press conference on Sunday, Mr. Li conceded that even the lowered growth targets Beijing has set out will be difficult to attain. With nearly every day seeming to bring more unhappy indicators of the economy’s health, Chinese officials are clearly feeling more pressure to simply stop the decline in their own backyards, instead of engaging in the sort of meaningful economic restructuring that Li insists is necessary for the long-term health of the country at large.
There’s no indication that local officials in China are willing to wait very long. Their preference is for stimulus packages and debt relief tailored for their own particular provinces. When the question of economic restructuring was presented to delegates, the discussion often devolved into representatives talking about specific challenges in a given region. Even with the shadow of a severe economic slowdown looming, attendees at this year’s meetings argued national initiatives in local terms.
That attitude doesn’t bode well when it comes to support for Li’s strategy to redesign China’s economy. Previous Chinese premiers attempted economic reform during periods of high growth, when the arguments between Beijing and the provinces were over how much largesse, not how little. Li and his supporters are facing a very different notion of normal.
The second predicament Beijing faces is political.
It’s not only that Li and President Xi Jinping often have different notions about how to best move the nation forward. At meetings that are usually largely in the portfolio of Chinese premiers, Xi managed to impose his remedy of “less economics, more ideology” on the legislative sessions—so much so that while Li was answering reporters’ questions about the state of the nation, state-controlled media was featuring extensive coverage of Xi’s own visits and statements to delegates.
While political pulling-and-hauling is nothing new in Beijing, the government’s ability to confront China’s new challenges must, at a minimum, rest on consensus between the two leaders, if only so that they can cope collectively with resistance in the bureaucracy and beyond. There’s not a lot of evidence of that agreement about presently.
Another part of this political impediment is that, owing to the apprehension produced by Xi’s anti-corruption drive, many lower-level cadres are sitting on their hands, afraid to act decisively lest they draw attention to themselves. Then there’s also the unease in Beijing that too many officials see reform and policy experimentation as anathema. Those situations so concern Xi and his supporters that state media began last week to feature “Eight Instructions” —a list of directives drawn from Xi’s early political career, which implored officials to recognize that “special situations demand special approaches”, and to “act immediately” when they saw a problem, instead of “being lazy and lethargic.”
Beijing has managed to dodge disaster before, and the fact that there remains robust debate in the leadership about the obstacles to reform is a small positive sign amidst these new difficulties. Xi might be attempting to dominate decision-making, but he’s hasn’t shut down political dialogue entirely, probably because he knows that it sometimes provides unusual ideas to address China’s new problems.
Still, the just-concluded legislative sessions seem to be another example of the deinstitutionalization of Chinese politics under Xi, where change is driven by a small group that doesn’t always agree on what’s wrong or how to solve it. Months from now, these meetings won’t be seen as harbingers of reform, so much as another lost opportunity.
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
