President Xi Jinping has spent the past decade building the Chinese state around him. This week he formally removed his final obstacle: the power of the State Council.
When Beijing opened its markets to the world in the 1980s, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, introduced the “Organic Law” to separate the Communist Party from the bureaucratic functions of government.
Xi Jinping adjusts his jacket during the closing session of the National People’s Congress on Monday.Credit: AP
The goal was to make the economy look more stable and efficient to investors. It worked. Billions flowed into China’s coffers, and the economy recorded double-digit growth rates for many of the next 30 years.
But in the final act of this year’s National People’s Congress in Beijing on Monday, that distinction was extinguished.
For the first time in four decades, Article Three of the Organic Law was changed to make the role of the State Council, which includes the premier, economic ministers and foreign envoys, indivisible from the party.
The changes make it clear that the council’s role is no longer confined to implementing economic development, education outcomes or managing judicial affairs. Its primary job now is to “uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China” through the guidance of Mao Zedong, Deng and “Xi Jinping Thought”.
This fusion of party and state has been under way since Xi took power in 2013 and wrote both the party and himself into the Constitution in 2017. The official subordination of the State Council – voted for by 2883 delegates to eight at the congress – has made that transformation complete.
“It is cast in stone,” said Dr Alfred Wu, a Chinese politics expert at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “It is a pyramid system, and Xi is at the top. The party and the state are no longer parallel systems.”
Xi extinguishes separation of powers, fuses the party with the state
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13.03.2024
President Xi Jinping has spent the past decade building the Chinese state around him. This week he formally removed his final obstacle: the power of the State Council.
When Beijing opened its markets to the world in the 1980s, China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, introduced the “Organic Law” to separate the Communist Party from the bureaucratic functions of government.
Xi Jinping adjusts his jacket during the closing session of the National People’s Congress........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
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