These important changes in political ideology have directly led to pragmatic political innovation. From the perspective of governance, ideological innovation will immediately propel or greatly help to bring about important changes to Chinese politics in the following ways:
Moderate separation between the Party and the state, with the Party's activities restrained within the precincts of state law. Blending the Party and the state, and mixing the Party and the government are the prominent features of traditional politics. Chairman Mao Zedong called this kind of political system: "Communist Party's absolute centralized leadership". At the inception of reformation, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party set "separation of the Party and the state" as the overriding aim, or even as the breakthrough point to the whole political system reform. Although the ideal target of separating the Party and the state is still a way off, two decades of great efforts have brought great progress into the project and abolished the "Communist Party's absolute centralized leadership".
The two most important advancements in this front are: First, the CPC has officially proclaimed that the Party should not override the law, that it should carry out its activities within the precinct of the state law, and it does not have any special privilege allowing it to surpass the Constitution and the law. Second, the CPC shall not substitute government as a direct administrative department.
Governing the country by law. First of all, the Constitution was to be amended and in 1982 the new Constitution came into effect. From 1979 to 2005, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed 400 laws and decisions regarding laws; the State Council promulgated over 650 administration laws and the local people congresses and their standing committees established over 7,500 local laws and regulations. The goal of the Chinese government is a comparatively perfect legal system on the whole by 2010.
Enlarging the scope of direct elections and local self-governance. Since the open-up policy was adopted, Chinese leaders have attached great importance to the democracy in grass roots government. The Organic Law of Villager’s Committees was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in December 1982, which stipulates that villagers' self-governance systems will gradually be implemented in rural areas. The organ of state power will no longer run the villagers' affairs directly while the village chief and other village cadres will be elected by the villagers themselves. According to the preliminary statistics, the average rate of the villagers' participation in the election is over 80 percent nationwide. By the end of 2004, 644,000 villager’s committees had been established in rural areas. In China, over 8 billion out of the 1.3 billion are farmers to date.
Promote the open administration and improve political transparency. Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese government started to emphasize the concept of open administration. The major contents of open administration include:
a) Release the legislation and policy-making information in a timely fashion. When making laws, regulations and policies, the government should bear the obligation to make everything clear to the public within a prescribed time, inform any interested people in advance and listen to public opinions and suggestions as much as possible;
b) Important administration information should be released. The government shall actively and regularly issue related information about the government department setups, department functions and working procedures as well as other administrative affairs' information, allowing the people to fully enjoy the right to know the political information;
c) To unveil important information on a regular basis: the government will notify the public of the development plans, specific programming, economic statistics, budget planning and implementation progress etc.;
d) Judicial Open. Relevant government departments should notify those related individuals about any judicial issue concerning citizen's own interests, including public security, household administration, detention, trial, prosecution and others, and ask the public to correspondingly scrutinize judicial and police powers; e) Announcing to the public before official's inauguration. Before new leaders of the positions of the Party and the government are appointed, information about the very candidate should be released to the public while the public opinions about the candidate should be heard;
f) Implement E-government at a full scale. Governments at every level should set up official websites, publishing governance information and work, dealing with public issues, and answering citizens' inquiries online.
Establishing a service-oriented government by improving public services. In recent years, the Chinese government has taken many practical methods in order to establish a service-oriented government. These methods are: first, simplifying the examination and approval procedures; second, providing the "one-stop" service on a larger scale so as to shorten the period of the approval procedures and reduce executive costs; third, strengthening the administrative responsibility by putting all kinds of commitment approaches, so as to avoid passing the buck, a common procedure in the past, and imposing administrative sanctions on delinquent officers; and fourth, establishing an emergency response and management system after the SARS crisis in 2003.
Adopting a hearing system and a consultation system to speed up the democratic process of the policy-making. The hearing system was introduced into China since 1990s, and began to play an increasingly important role in government decision process.
Being part of the Chinese political reformation, all the political progresses mentioned above are the achievement of reform and opening-up policy. All these political advancement and governmental innovation, even those originated from western civilization, are with distinct Chinese characteristics and are the results of the combination with the specific condition of China.
(To be continued...)
(China.org.cn, 17thcongress.org.cn October 20, 2007)
