On Alternative Political Parties in China

First, before we can discuss this topic, we have to briefly understand how officeholders are elected in the PRC. The PRC political system is composed of a series of indirect elections in which one People's Congress appoints the members of the next higher congress. In this voting system voters directly elect an assembly based on popular vote, which in turn elects the major officeholders from amongst themselves. The PRC is, of course, not alone in the use of this system. The Parliamentary Assemblies of the Council of Europe and NATO also employ this method, and so does the U.S. Presidential election, with the indirect vote from the Electoral College the sole determinant of the victor. Of all elective methods it is the most dissatisfying, of course. It's only marginally representative and is, in broad scale elections, highly suppressive of popular will.

There are five central and local levels of people's congresses in China: 1) the National People's Congress, 2) the people's congresses of provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, 3) the people's congresses of cities divided into districts, and autonomous prefectures, 4) the people's congresses of cities not divided into districts, municipal districts, counties and autonomous counties, and 5) the people's congresses of townships, ethnic minority townships and towns. "The people's congresses at all levels are constituted through democratic elections,” says News Guandong, an official news body from where I gathered the above sawdust. But as Bao Tong points out (during his most recent comments read on RFA, 2008-07-08), “It is a pack of bureaucrats nominated by the Communist Party, whose names have been picked out of a mechanical ‘election’ process, who have been given a franchise on state power, with no competition.”

In China only the lowest People's Congresses are subject to direct popular vote. This means that although independent members can theoretically get elected to the lowest level of congress (and occasionally in practice do), it is impossible for them to organize to the point where they can elect members to the next higher people's congress without the approval of the CCP. Therefore, they are not able to exercise oversight over executive positions at the lowest level in the hierarchy. This lack of effective power also discourages outsiders from contesting the people's congress elections even at the lowest level.

Thus, only one political party, the CCP, holds effective power at the national level, though eight minor parties also participate in a token fashion within the political system under the leadership of the dominant party. The PRC political system allows for the participation of some non-party members and those affiliated with minor parties in the NPC, but they are vetted by the CCP. In almost all cases those individuals do not satisfy the Party's criteria for "suitability".

A further damper to the ambitions of an outside party is that there is no provision in the PRC constitution which would give non-CCP political parties any corporate status. This means that a hypothetical opposition party would have no legal means to collect funds or own property in the name of a party. More importantly, PRC law also has a wide range of offenses which can and have been used against the leaders of efforts to form an opposition party such as the China Democracy Party, and against members of organizations that the CCP sees as threatening its power. These include the crimes of subversion, sedition and releasing "state secrets" (a buzz word that the Party uses a lot for anything it finds incriminating of itself). Moreover, the control that the Party has over the legislative and judicial processes means that the Party can author legislation that targets a particular group it doesn't find "suitable".

The argument that the CCP uses to defend single party rule is fallacy of necessity for the ages: without it in power the country would fall apart. A different party in power would ensure that the country had, indeed, fallen apart, ergo; no other party can rule because the country would fall apart. There is also the bare assertion that this is true because the Party says it's true. Consequently, by suppressing a free media and other political organizations, finding alternatives to governing the nation more pluralistically become, well, let's just say, exceedingly difficult. The Chinese are brilliant logicians.

Credit to Wikipedia Authors: "Alternative Political Parties in China"