IN A country that has changed nearly beyond recognition in a generation, it is perhaps reassuring that some things remain much the same. Every spring the forbidding, cavernous pile of the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square plays host to a timeless ritual. The nearly 3,000 delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC) gather for a brief annual session (it lasted 12 days this year, ending on March 16th). This is what the constitution calls the “highest organ of state power”. Yet its members behave like well-trained extras in a drama scripted elsewhere. Rather than evolving, as once seemed possible, into a forum where China’s problems are discussed and different views are aired, the NPC is becoming less open and more controlled. In that respect at least, it reflects what is happening in the country more broadly.
As they have since the first NPC convened in 1954, delegates stay heroically awake as turgid speakers drone on; they applaud enthusiastically on cue; and they approve, without exception, the laws, budgets and government reports put before them. The synchronised pouring of tea into leaders’ cups, aligned with geometric...Continue reading
Source: China http://ift.tt/1RoOntz
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