Some may be tempted to stop at Le Monde’s headline, “China’s government is increasingly subservient to the Communist Party.” But let’s soldier on.
Next we learn: “A new amendment asserts the role of government institutions as mere executors while the premier’s annual press conference has been canceled.”
The premier’s press conference was simply scrapped. On the same day, the National People’s Congress voted on a text that clarified, if it wasn’t clear, the workings of the government and its subservience to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The amendment to the law that has governed the institution for the past 41 years and since the economic reform specifies that the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the government’s official name, “is the highest executive body” and the country’s “highest administration,” but that its role is also to “resolutely implement the decisions of the Central Committee” of the CCP, whose authority it must “resolutely protect.”…
This law is unlikely to change the way that China’s institutions operate overnight, but 11 years after Xi’s ascent to the pinnacle of power, it does add to an obvious trend: The party strengthens and decides, while the government merely applies….
The centralization of power and a very “red” ideological focus are helping to prioritize security concerns, to the detriment of openness, at a time when the economy is showing signs of weakness.
Xi Jinping is further consolidating his power. It is one of his pastimes. As far as we can tell, most or all of those under him in the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese state are, as usual, ratifying by rote everything he wants.
Xi is the top dog of the CCP and the top dog of the government. It’s a one-party state. The party and the state are the same thing. Maybe you can say that the Chinese state is “subservient” to the CCP in some sense. But the CCP and the Central Committee are not outside of the Chinese state.
Willy Lam, China specialist at the Jamestown Foundation, says: “Obviously, everyone already knows that supreme power lies with the party, but Xi Jinping needs to make this clear again and again, in black and white.”
Why is that? Is Xi insecure? Are there rumblings or whispers of discontent behind the scenes…?
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Why Did Li Qiang or Somebody Cancel the Premier’s Annual Press Conference?”
