The Provincial People’s Congress (PPC) is the provincial legislature of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). According to China’s current Constitution, legislature is structured as a unicameral parliament, which has the power to elect senior officials and to supervise the operation of government, courts, and procurator at corresponding levels. In particular, the PPC has a collection of functions and powers including electing delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) and approving the appointment of senior officials in provincial government, as well as examining the work reports of the government. Additionally, the standing committee exercises most of the Constitution’s power on a day-to-day basis. According to the Organic Law (Article 6), the PPC is elected for a term of five years. The annual sessions are held in early spring before the National “Two Sessions,” which often last around two weeks.
In theory, various levels of people’s congresses are the supreme political authority in China’s political system. Throughout the history of the PRC, all four versions of the constitutions were vested in the People’s Congress, with substantial law-making power. At the provincial level, the PPC approves the most fundamental policy issues and makes key personnel decisions. While in practice, a growing literature suggests that the People’s Congress mainly play two roles. First, it serves as a cooptation platform to incorporate elites with non-party membership, such as private entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and religionists. Regarding its policy-making function, People’s Congress is a consultative venue, through which citizens’ non-politically sensitive demands could be considered. Several studies show that delegates debated over controversial public policies and initiated legislative motions on the legislative drafts rather than voting affirmatively. A case study on the Hainan provincial congress tracked the process of how the standing committee and different government branches dealt with the delegates’ motions and suggestions, finally finding that the PPCs play a substantial role in advising the policies.
The drafting process of the PPC is governed by three laws: the Organic Law of the various levels of People’s Congress, the Legislative Law, and the PPC procedural rules. The Organic Law clarifies the hierarchical relationships among different levels of People’s Congress, the electoral procedure, and delegates’ right and obligation in the congress; the Legislative Law offers comprehensive regulations over the drafting process and scope of legal application. These two national laws cover general provisions on legislation, while thirty-one PPC procedural rules offer diversified provisions for organizing the meeting and drafting process.
Chinese congresses disappeared from 1966 to 1976, a result of a radical political campaign, the Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao Zedong and the “Gang of Four.” After Mao’s death, a new Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping, renounced the disorder in governance and launched legal reform. Regarding the building of institutions, various levels of congresses re-emerged in local and national political arenas, serving as information-gathering venues, in that delegates represented their constituencies’ demands into the policy-making process.
Moreover, the People’s Congress adopted a legislation policy, a comprehensive legal system of “enacting, enforcing and protecting law,” to rationalize the governance. As a consequence, a significant amount of laws, ordinances, and regulations have been approved by Chinese congresses. However, in the early stages of development, local legislations were coarse and conflicts prevailed between the higher-level laws and by-laws. To enhance the legislative quality rather than to merely pursue the quantity, the Communist leaders launched a second wave of legal reform in the late 1980s, with the goal of constructing a more coherent legal system.
In April 1989, the NPC approved a procedural rule to institutionalize the legislative proceedings. It was the first formal regulation on parliamentary procedure since the establishment of the communist regime. Soon after the national legislation, Local People’s Congresses began to regulate the decision-making process by making their own procedural rules. shows the establishment of procedural rules in provincial and prefectural-level people’s congresses from 1989 to 2011. By the end of 1993, only five years since the first building of legislative procedure in PRC, twenty-two out of thirty-one provincial legislatures had passed procedural rules. At the same time, only three out of eighteen major cities that had legislative power had approved their Rule of Procedure.
Figure 1. The Legislature of the ROP on Provincial and Prefectural Level Administrative Units.
The progressive reform of Chinese legislature continued in the first decades of twenty-first century. Legislation, such as the new Legislative Law (2000) and the amendment of the Organic Law (2004), provided greater autonomy for local people’s congresses than laws passed in the 1990s. These new laws allowed local legislatures to approve the bills when there is no corresponding national law passed by the NPC, creating room for local institutional development.
In terms of the procedural rules, several PPCs passed the amendment of rule of procedure in order to expand the power of legislatures and enhance formal impact of their delegates. A variety of unique articles were added to the new version of the procedural rules, which became diverse on issues such as delegates’ speech time, the time limitation for proposal submission, information availability, and so forth. For example, in Fujian, Tianjin, and Chongqing, the congress is required publish all of the decisions regarding regulations in the local newspapers while other provinces do not have such a stipulation.
The PPCs’ legislation is intriguing for empirical study. However, there is a very limited number of studies that focus on this topic. In this volume, I have selected five provincial-level procedural rules (Tibet, Tianjin, Chongqing, Gansu, and Fujian) to showcase the development of China’s local legislatures and its regional variation. These rules are chosen to cover a spectrum of institutional features of China’s local legislatures. The rest of this introduction is organized as follows. First, I will offer a brief account of the history of China’s legislative reform. After that, a discussion on the rationale for case selection would be presented.
The rationale for case selection is three-fold. First is the geographic distribution. The five cases include both economically developed and developing regions in China. Tibet and Gansu are among the five poorest provincial units in terms of both residence income and GDP per capita, while Tianjin and Jiangsu are bellwethers of economic performance in recent decades. Moreover, I take the approval time into account regarding case selection. The selected cases cover the procedural rule passed in different periods, ranging from 1990 (Gansu) to 2010 (Tianjin). More importantly, the five selected cases are chosen for their particularity. I present the characteristics of the selected procedural rules case by case, as follows.
The first case, Tibet, is an autonomous region located in the southwest of China with the largest ethnic minority population. In 1950, the PRC incorporated with the Tibetan local government by giving them significant autonomy. Tibet is the most recent area in the PRC’s sovereignty to establish a modern legislature. It was not until 1965, six years after fourteenth Dalai Lama fled to India, that the Tibetan’s first provincial people’s congress assembly was held. Nonetheless, Tibet is among the first group of provincial units to launch legislative reform in the late 1980s. The Tibetan People’s Congress approved the procedural rule in 1989. The rule is characterized by its ethnic minority focus. It clearly articulates the delegates’ right to use a minority language when they are debating, voting, and addressing the congress. Additionally, all legislative documents must be translated into Tibetan language. Otherwise, minority delegates can address speeches by using either Tibetan or Mandarin Chinese. These articles are in line with the protection of minority rights as articulated by Law of the Peoples Republic of China on Regional National Autonomy.
The second case is Tianjin, one of the five direct-administrated municipalities with provincial authority (“DAM”). Not only having considerable weight in China’s economic system, the DAM also plays a crucial role in Chinese politics in that the DAM’s party secretaries are competitive candidates for the next CPC Politburo members. Taking the eighteenth CPC Politburo as an example, three out of seven members had working experience in the DAM before walking into Zhong Nan Hai. Zhang Gaoli, the former party secretary of Tianjin, is one of them. Additionally, the current Constitution entitles the DAM’s congress to the equivalent power as autonomous regions in terms of making local laws and regulations. For instance, the DAM can make supplementary provisions on national crime law within their jurisdictions. The procedural rule reflects the higher level of legislative autonomy in DAM. Regarding the delegates’ power in People’s Congress, delegates have ten minutes to speak during the discussion section and can prolong their speeches (Article No.59). In addition, Tianjin’s procedural rule is distinguished by its unique structure. Unlike other provincial-level procedural rules, Tianjin’s rule does not contain a separate chapter on the provisions of Investigation Committee, a temporary apparatus providing legislative supervision over other administrative branches. The missing chapter in Tianjin’s procedural rule reflects the pessimistic nature of China’s legislatures. Due to its weakness, the investigation committee merely has the de jure power. Along the history of PRC, the PPCs had never conducted an independent investigation or initiated impeachment of government leaders.
Located in the inner land of China, Chongqing, the other DAM with provincial authority, is the third case. In recent decades, the legal environment in Chongqing became notorious for its crime crackdown campaign led by the arrested party secretary Bo Xilai. During the campaign, police officers arbitrarily took the private entrepreneurs into custody and forced them to donate money to the city government. However, in contradiction with the miserable judicial environment, the procedural rule of Chongqing’s People’ Congress is the most comprehensive among thirty-one provinces. The length and complexity marks Chongqing’s procedural rule. Chongqing’s rule contains as many as seventy-five articles, compared with a mean of sixty-one over thirty-one provincial procedural rules. Owing to its enormous volume, Chongqing’s rule contains very detailed provisions on legislative procedures. For instance, it stipulates that the ultimate power during the session belongs to the assembly meeting and during the adjournment period the standing committee holds the power.
Additionally, I have chosen Gansu, an economically backward province bordering Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Qinghai, as the fourth case. The legal institution in Gansu is underdeveloped as well. According to the 2012 provincial legal transparency index, Gansu achieved a score of 46.5 over 100, and ranked as the fifth lowest among thirty-one provincial units. In terms of legislative procedure, a remarkable feature of Gansu’s rule is that both the enactment and the revision of procedural rule are approved by the standing committee, while the assembly passes procedural rules in other provinces. The standing committee, whose members are mainly CPC members and former government officials, is easier to control rather the assembly, a large group of local elites from various occupations.
The last case is Jiangsu, a well-developed province that lies in the Yangtze River Delta. During the PRC era, Jiangsu quickly industrialized and became the most densely populated region. Regarding legislative development, Jiangsu passed its procedural rule in 1991 and made an amendment in 1997. The 1997 amendment maintains its legal validity and is the most concise among all the current PPC procedural rules, containing only forty-eight articles and 5,538 words. The regulations on voting procedure, revising government budget and setting legislation agenda are ambiguous and sweeping. For example, “when necessary,” a vague norm often used to make the exception for illegality occurs in Jiangsu’s procedural rule 6 times as compared with a mean of 4.3 times among thirty-one PPCs’ procedural rule.
To sum up, the main purpose of introducing and translating the selected procedural rules is to show the emerging diversity in Chinese local legislatures. Despite being selected through a non-probability approach, these cases are worth reading and studying owing to their heterogeneity, which reflects the trajectory of legal development in contemporary China.