China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [35]
The administrative branch is the biggest beneficiary of the passage of administrative laws in the last twenty years. The administrative branch ceaselessly uses the legislative process to expand its power and, through this process, legalizes certain illegitimate powers. This has resulted in imbalances between the rights of citizens and the power of the administrative branch... This problem also stems from the lack of democracy in the legislative process; there is not enough participation by the people.39
Such criticism is shared by Stanley Lubman, who believes that the language of Chinese legislation and rules is intentionally designed to maximizc flexibility and discretion. As a result, arbitrariness is embedded in Chinese laws and rules.40
In The Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China, Murray Scot Tanner tries to provide a more positive assessment of the NPC’s institutional development. In his case study of the passage of several laws, Tanner suggests that the political monopoly of the CCP in policy-making was waning and that the NPC was gaining influence as a player in China’s decision-making process. However, Tanner does not believe that the NPC’s emergence as a key institutional actor necessarily signals the arrival of democratic politics or pluralism. Instead, the NPC should be viewed as a political arena where bureaucratic and factional politics are played out as different bureaucratic and interest groups within the CCP seize the political forum provided by the NPC to express policy preferences.
Tanner identifies several positive trends indicative of the NPC’s growing influence. Using the data on dissenting votes and the number of motions put forth by delegates during NPC plenary sessions, he argues that NPC delegates have continued to shed their rubber-stamp reputation and become more assertive. The NPC has increased in power and authority through the leadership of powerful individual politicians, such as Peng Zhen. In many cases, nominally retired CCP elders were able to assert their influence through the NPC Standing Committee or the body’s plenary sessions. Tanner believes that, with the expansion of the NPC’s professional staff and committee system, the legislative branch has become more capable of forcing the executive bureaucracy to share policy-making power.
Tanner concedes, however, that the CCP continues to wield enormous authority in the lawmaking process. For example, the CCP Politburo must approve the candidate list for the NPC Standing Committee. Through appointments to the chairmen’s group, the party controls agenda-setting privileges. Additionally, party groups within the NPC, including the Standing Committee CCP group, communicate legislative activities to the party Secretariat. CCP Politburo and Secretariat approval is required for almost all draft laws promulgated by the NPC. Consequently, Tanner remains uncertain whether reforms in the lawmaking process will affect China’s democratic prospects.41
Despite such divergent assessments of NPC reforms, it is possible to apply several critical tests to measure whether the NPC and LPCs have gained real institutional autonomy since the late 1970s.
Legislative Output
The most important achievement of the NPC was its enormous legislative output (Table 2.1). The several hundred laws and resolutions passed by the NPC since 1978 have provided the legal framework for economic reform and rationalized administrative procedures. For example, of all the laws and resolutions that were enacted by the NPC from 1978 to 2002, ninety-five, or about a third, were economic laws. 42 Of the 216 new laws passed from June 1979 to August 2000, 126 were classified as administrative laws.43
But these numbers should not be taken at face