China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [38]
Organizational Growth
Organizationally, the NPC has grown considerably as well. The body had only fifty-four full-time staffers in 1979. By the mid-1990s, the numbcr had risen to about two thousand.61 The NPC’s committee system grew as well. From 1983 to 2003, the number of specialized committees in the NPC Standing Committee rose from six to nine. Nationwide, the number of staffers in the People’s Congress system at and above the county-level reached 70,000 by 1997.62 As a whole, however, the membership of the NPC and LPCs does not mirror Chinese society. Rather, it appears to better represent the bureaucratic interests of the Chinese state and the ruling CCP. For example, nearly all of the 134 members of the 9th NPC Standing Committee (average age 63.4) were retired government and party officials.63
CCP members make up about two-thirds of the delegates to the NPC and LPCs. In the NPC, the percentage of delegates who were CCP members was 73 in 1981 and 72 in 1998. The situation is similar in LPCs. In 1998, 72 percent of the delegates to provincial people’s congresses and 75 percent of the delegates to municipal people’s congresses were CCP members. In fact, the party’s presence in the NPC and LPCs was less domineering during the early years of the People’s Republic. In 1954, for example, 55 percent of the NPC delegates were CCP members, and 58 percent of the delegates to the provincial people’s congresses were CCP members.64
As a group, members of the NPC and LPCs are among China’s political and social elites, based on their educational attainment and occupations. Seventy-three percent of the NPC delegates and 62 percent of the delegates to municipal people’s congresses in 1998 had college degrees or college-equivalent education, compared to the average of the national population of about 3 percent. Twenty-one percent of the NPC delegates were “intellectuals” and professionals. In addition, while the percentage of peasants and workers declined steadily from the 1980s, the share of officials rose significantly. In 1983, workers and peasants made up 27 percent of NPC delegates. By 1999, their combined share had fallen to 19 percent. By comparison, the share of officials among NPC delegates increased from 21 percent in 1983 to 33 percent in 1999. Together with the military (9 percent), representatives of the Chinese party-state accounted for 42 percent of NPC delegates. The share of officials in the delegates to provincial people’s congresses was even higher. From 1983 to 1999, it rose from 24 percent to 43 percent, while the combined share of workers and peasants fell from 33 percent to 24 percent.65
In retrospect, the failure of the Chinese NPC and LPCs to grow into genuine autonomous legislative institutions capable of checking the power of the CCP and the Chinese state is fully predictable. It is clear, both from elite-level discussions and the CCP’s actual policy, that the party has never intended for the legislative branch to acquire its own institutional identity or power because the CCP recognizes the huge risks that an autonomous legislative branch would entail. As Barrett McCormick argues, genuine institutional pluralism embodied in an autonomous legislative branch such as the NPC would fundamentally endanger the survivability of Leninist states. The fear of such a danger led Chinese leaders to restrict the power of the NPC, even as they tried to make the institution an instrument of popular legitimization.66 Consequently, the NPC and LPCs, which are not directly elected through competitive elections, lack their own power base and popular legitimacy and must depend on the support of the executive branch—the Chinese party-state—for their institutional existence and relevance.67
Legal Reform
The efforts by the Chinese government to develop