You’ve maybe heard of the “Two Sessions” (两会; “Two Meetings”), that take place every year in Beijing, whereby the upper echelons of the Chinese authorities thrash out what they might achieve in the coming while. And every 5 years, there’s a big one. Black cat; 2023 is the year.
However, together, if you were to speak them aloud, “National People’s Congress” (NPC) and “Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference” (CPPCC) alone take 5 seconds to say.
So, let us sum it up for you, real fast.
As the saying goes, there ain’t no party like the Communist Party of China (CPC). You bet. The CPC holds a whopping 2,157 of the 2,987 seats in the NPC. But the remaining 830 are occupied by a surprising array of other political groups, such as the China Association for Promoting Democracy, the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party, and the China Party for Public Interest.
The CPPCC, on the other hand, is a little more complicated, but China’s constitution says that it provides for “multi-party cooperation and political consultation”.
Members are selected through dialogue and recommendation, represent all sectors of society, just as with China’s banknotes, and comprise a much broader range of people than is typical for a Chinese-government institution.
We could think of it this way. The NPC is China’s parliament, or government, and the CPPCC promotes transparency and holds the government to account.
To a degree, one may also imagine the structure as much like the American model of a Senate and Congress, or in the United Kingdom where they have the House of Commons and House of Lords. In essence, it’s all about checks and balances. Making sure people toe the line, when they are, after all, representing us, the people.
Back in China, it is this structure of the NPC and CPPCC that trickles all the way down to provincial, city, district, county and village levels of government, providing for purpose and essentially, a to-do list for local authorities.
And the political importance of the Two Sessions is why your VPN isn’t working.
