BEIJING, Feb 24, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – China is expected to decide Monday
whether to postpone its annual parliament session for the first time since
the Cultural Revolution as the country battles the coronavirus outbreak.
Top Communist Party leaders including President Xi Jinping attend each
year’s gathering of the National People’s Congress, which rubber-stamps
bills, budgets and personnel moves already decided by the party.
But much of China has ground to a halt in the battle against an outbreak
that has infected nearly 80,000 people and claimed more than 2,500 lives.
Many top officials who would normally attend the meeting are consumed with
tackling the virus in their home regions.
And Beijing has imposed quarantine measures on those arriving from other
parts of China, a practical challenge for a gathering of nearly 3,000
delegates. Then there are the bad optics of China’s leaders arriving in face
masks for a meeting that is highly stage-managed to present the image of a
Communist Party in perfect control of the country.
The NPC’s Standing Committee meets on Monday to discuss whether to delay
the session, which was due to start on March 5.
Ling Li, a lecturer on Chinese politics at the University of Vienna, said
postponement was “very likely”.
“If the situation is not significantly improved by Monday, then a decision
not to postpone the NPC conference would be unreasonable and signal a
desperate effort of the authorities to keep up the appearance of political
normality, which is not there,” she said.
– Rubber stamp –
The gathering is used to portray the government as answerable to the
people’s representatives, but its deliberations are pre-determined well in
advance and the whole event is tightly choreographed by the Communist Party.
Nevertheless, it generates global interest as a glimpse into China’s
political and economic policy priorities for the coming year.
Despite its highly choreographed nature, the NPC meeting can still herald
important changes.
The 2018 session approved the removal of presidential term limits —
handing Xi a potentially lifelong tenure.
With Mao Zedong as the meeting’s chair, the NPC first convened in
September 1954 in Beijing, where delegates passed the new constitution of the
People’s Republic of China, five years after its founding.
The legislature met almost every year after that for the next decade, but
paused during the decade of political turmoil ushered in by Mao’s Cultural
Revolution.
It re-convened in 1978, two years after Mao’s death.
Since 1985, it has been held each March — and on March 5 specifically for
the last two decades.
But everyday life has been paralysed by the virus and unprecedented
measures to contain it, including the lockdown of tens of millions of people
at the epicentre in central Hubei province.
Zang Tiewei, a spokesman for the legislative affairs commission of the NPC
Standing Committee, told state-controlled news agency Xinhua that delaying
the yearly political event was “necessary” to ensure “attention is focused on
the prevention and control of the epidemic.”
Dorothy Solinger, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of
California at Irvine, said it would be a “smart move to postpone.”
“Look at the message that sends,” she said. “We (the government) are
putting all our effort into combatting the virus. We don’t have the time to
hold these meetings now.”
The virus also deeply impacts some of the session’s most hallowed rituals,
she said.
“How could they present the mandatory NPC upbeat accounts of the progress
and positive prognosis of the economy and other achievements in the midst of
such uncertainty as they’re facing now?”