Retrofitting Leninism by Dimitar Gueorguiev;

Author:Dimitar Gueorguiev;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

It is important to stress that this logic is not China-specific. Indeed, even in the United States, the diversity of sponsors participating in a coalition is the clearest indicator for breadth of support, such that a proposal backed by multiple parties is interpreted as having broader appeal than one backed by only a single party.37 China only has one party, however, and it is not obvious whether the same political38 and reputational mechanisms39 that make bipartisanship costly in the United States are present in the Chinese case.

There are, however, China-specific institutional constraints to diversity. LPC delegates, most of whom are part-time representatives, have no staff or organizational resources through which to lobby peers. During plenary sessions, delegates are typically confined to meeting and sitting with delegates from the same geographic constituency. As noted earlier, outside of the annual plenary sessions, delegates have few opportunities to meet and discuss proposal strategies and attempts to organize independently are illegal. Such barriers can lead to obvious failures in coordination. For instance, when I asked Huang Suning, a nationally renowned advocate for disability rights from Shenzhen, whether she had ever coordinated with Huang Ruiru, another prominent advocate of disability groups from her own municipal legislative congress but a different district, she said she had never worked with him before, explaining that “working with other delegations is very hard.”

In addition to the lack of meetings and networking opportunities, working across delegation lines also carries transactional and reputational costs. When asking individual delegates about seeking outside cosponsors, most describe it as “very troublesome” (hen mafan). “First, you need a reason to call them or take them out to dinner. Then, you have to wait a while before you remind them about it. Then, they ask who else is signing on … . Most people doubt your intentions, so it’s hard.”40 Importantly, legislative leaders recognize the challenges to cosponsorship across delegation lines and use it as an indicator of quality. “If you ask for someone else’s signature you are going to make sure it’s not garbage first!”41 The higher up you go in the legislative ranks, the more apparent these barriers to cross-group coordination become, as illustrated with the introductory anecdote about NPC accommodations in Beijing. Yet, at each level, the barriers to coordination are not overt or draconian. They don’t bespeak dictatorship, yet they undermine horizontal communication by compartmentalizing and demobilizing organic civil society.

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