China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [37]
For many NPC delegates, the passage of a “supervision law” (jiandu fa), which would explicitly grant the legislative branch broad-ranged oversight power, attracted a great deal of interest even though legislative intervention in judicial proceedings is considered harmful to judicial independence. From 1993 to 1999, more than 1,600 NPC delegates proposed 51 pieces of legislation to legalize judicial oversight.54 While the NPC insists that such oversight, in cases involving major violations of law, does not constitute interference in legal proceedings, however, it has yet to enact a law formally granting itself and LPCs the power of judicial and executive oversight.
Power of Appointment and Removal
Another noteworthy development is that LPCs have become an arena in which bureaucratic and factional politics begin to influence, in a very limited way, the appointment of local officials. Because Chinese law mandates “competitive elections” (cha’e xuanju) for senior local officials, LPC delegates have an opportunity to use such indirect “elections” to foil the appointment of official candidates and elect their own choices. Under Chinese law, an official candidate cannot be appointed if he or she fails to gain half the votes of the delegates. LPC delegates can also write in their nominees. In Liaoning in the late 1990s, for example, the CCP’s provincial organization department (POD) reported that an increasing number of official candidates could not be confirmed by LPCs due to factionalism, poor lobbying by the party, and unattractive nominees. Local legislators occasionally were successful in nominating and electing their own candidates to local offices. In five cities in Liaoning, twelve independent candidates were elected to local offices.55 Similar incidents occurred in Hangzhou’s twelve counties in the 1990s. Each time the county LPC appointed officials nominated by the party, an average of six to nine official nominees would fail to be appointed, while the same number of unofficial candidates nominated by the delegates themselves would get elected. In the counties where the LPG delegates were the most assertive, about 10 to 15 percent of the official nominees would fail to get elected.56
In practice, however, such revolts by LPC delegates are rare, and nearly all the candidates nominated by the CCP are appointed. According to a senior NPC official, Qiao Xiaoyang, from the mid-1980s to the mid- 1990s, only 2 percent of the candidates nominated by the provincial CCP Committee failed to win elections at the provincial People’s Congress.57 Nevertheless, the CCP has taken numerous measures to prevent such procedural setbacks. For example, the CCP’s POD in Liaoning proposed a set of measures to ensure the appointment of the party’s candidates. They include making local party chiefs the chairmen of the LPC Standing Committee, appointing the local CCP organization department chiefs to be the heads of the personnel committee of the LPCs, packing the presidium of the LPCs with loyalists, and appointing loyalists to be the heads of local delegations to the LPCs.58 In Hangzhou, the provincial party committee took similar steps prior to the convening of the municipal People’s Congress in 1996. These tactics were so effective that 98 percent of the official nominees won.59 Nationally, similar measures, some illegal or questionable, contributed to the dominance of the CCP over the LPCs. In 1997 and 1998, the election of the chairmen of the provincial People’s Congress Standing Committee was not competitive, contrary