Local People's Congresses in China: Development and Transition.

Sun, Ying

Local People's Congresses in China: Development and Transition. By Young Nam Cho. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 206 pp. $80.00 (cloth).

In this book, Young Nam Cho, of Seoul National University, addresses major function fulfillment of Local People's Congresses (LPCs) in China. The author attracts readers with two key questions: What are the functions of the LPCs, and how well do they fulfill them? What obstacles have the LPCs overcome, and what developmental strategies have they employed to reach their current political status? These two research questions bridge the gap between international comparative legislative studies and the study of Chinese contemporary politics.

To answer these questions, the author adopts the traditional methodology of comparative legislative studies--that is, he takes a structural-functional approach. Using a structural approach, the research investigates the LPCs' relationships and interactions with other state organs such as local governments and courts, as well as the Chinese Communist Party; using a functional approach, the research analyzes the legislation, supervision, and representation functions of LPCs. Besides traditional methods, the author also applies three perspectives to study the LPCs' development: the perspective of marketization and legalization, the perspective of actual power relations, and the perspective of path dependence. These perspectives help readers to understand the background of and process by which the roles of Chinese local legislatures have been reinforced.

To find reliable answers to the research questions, the author selects LPCs in Shanghai and Tianjin municipalities and Guangdong province. According to the author, these regions have led economic reforms in China, and thus the LPCs in these regions are the most representative of legislative development in China. The author interviewed senior leaders, officials, and staffers from the selected congresses, as well as insiders from governments and social organizations for first-hand materials. The author even stayed in Tianjin for one year to conduct interviews and to collect literary resources. In addition to field study, the book also relies on a wide range of literary documents, both in Chinese and in English.

Arranged by research topic, this book can be divided into four parts. The first part (Chapter 1) explains the research questions, main arguments, methodology, and layout of the book. The second part (Chapters 2-5) examines the lawmaking, oversight, and representation functions of local legislatures in China. These chapters also demonstrate the techniques used by the local legislatures and legislators to fulfill those functions. The third part (Chapters 6 and 7) investigates the relationship between LPCs and their external environment, namely, the social organizations and party committees. These two external variables provide both "bottom-up" motor and "top-down" initiative to the LPCs' development. The fourth part (Chapter 8) discusses the consequences of LPCs' empowerment vis-a-vis Chinese political development. It is argued that if political development refers to democratization and is marked by free elections and multiparty competition, the empowerment of Chinese local legislatures per se has had limited impact; if political development is understood as state capacity building and institutionalization of the political system, then the growth of the legislative branch has contributed significantly to China's political development.

Using substantial data and careful examination, the author argues that LPCs have strengthened lawmaking and supervisory roles and thereby have become important forces in the Chinese political system. To achieve this, the LPCs have employed sophisticated development strategies targeting different objectives: gaining the support of governments rather than confronting them; and participating aggressively in the courts. They have also used a mobilization strategy to encourage social organizations and the public to participate in legislative activities. Furthermore, it is argued that local legislatures have developed un evenly and that the political leadership of the party and legislatures is the most important determinant of these differences.

Compared with other valuable legislative research of China, this book has the following innovations: it distinguishes between the congressional oversight of government and of the courts; it reveals the symbiosis between local legislatures and social organizations; and, finally, it discusses the uneven development of the LPCs. These new perspectives capture the basic features of Chinese politics--a strong executive branch and weak judicial branch, the changing patterns of state-society relations, and the uneven economic-political development of the country in a reform era. In PRC China, the political status of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches are decided by their leaders' status inside the party hierarchy, and social organizations are penetrated by the party-state. These pieces of information are instrumental in observing Chinese politics.

The limitations of this research lie primarily in the methodology. The author selected provincial- and county-level LPCs only in coastal areas, while the municipal- and township-level people's congresses are overlooked. Therefore, the generalizations he makes are applicable to LPCs at neither the township nor the municipal level, nor to noncoastal regions of China. For example, the author comes to his conclusion that political leadership, not economic development, determined the uneven performance of local legislatures. But this conclusion was drawn from the comparison between district and county people's congresses within Tianjin City, not from the comparison between cities or provinces with different economic development levels in China. In the investigation on role fulfillment of members of parliament (MPs), the author concentrates on the "active" deputies and neglects the vast number of inactive deputies, concluding that deputies have become more progressive and more representative. Again, such generalization comes from a small sample and hence is not applicable to the whole population of MPs. In addition, for future study of Chinese legislature research, the internal structure of LPCs in China is an interesting topic waiting to be explored.

Notwithstanding these premature predictions, this book is the latest research outcome of legislative studies of China and is worth reading for comparative legislative students and scholars who are curious about the political changes that are occurring in China.

Ying Sun

Department of Law

University of Hong Kong