By Eva Cheng
Under the Communist Party's tight control, the annual session of China's parliament — the National People's Congress (NPC) — has traditionally been a staged event. It often is, however, a useful gauge of Beijing's prevailing concerns.
On the top of the list at this year's meeting, from March 5-15, was Beijing's perceived fear that the people of Taiwan will turn the March 18 presidential election into a quasi-referendum on their aspirations for independence.
Beijing is adamant in rejecting such aspirations. It has also been active in seeking to suppress them.
Four years ago, in the lead-up to Taiwan's first-ever free election for president, the most likely winner, incumbent Lee Teng-hui, supported independence in all but name. Viewing an overwhelming vote for Lee as being nearly as bad as a vote for independence, Beijing fired missiles into the sea around Taiwan to undermine Lee's support. Lee still won, but by a slim majority.
This time around, the most likely winner — Chen Shui-bian of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party and Taipei's mayor from 1994 to 1998 — is openly pro-independence. Though Chen recently said he had no plan to launch a vote on independence if he were elected, his victory could still drastically weaken Beijing's ability to coerce Taiwan into re-integrating with the mainland.
Chinese president Jiang Zemin seems to be tackling the Taiwan issue with a new sense of urgency. The pressure on him to let go of his supreme positions — as the chief of the ruling party, the government and the military — by the time of the CP's next congress in 2002 is growing.
Jiang presided over Hong Kong's 1997 return to China from British hands and Macau's return last December from the Portuguese and seems keen on Taiwan's re-integration while he is still president.
Ultimatums
Instead of missiles, this time Beijing has issued disturbing ultimatums to Taiwan. It declared, for example, in late February that it would no longer tolerate the Taiwan government indefinitely delaying discussions on "reunification", warning that force could be used if such delay dragged on. It didn't specify a deadline.
Beijing raised the pressure during the NPC meeting. "Taiwan's independence means war", General Zhang Wannian, vice-chairperson of the Central Military Commission, told delegates soon after the official opening. "With separatism, peace cannot prevail".
He added, "The PLA [People's Liberation Army] is completely determined, confident, capable and has the means to safeguard state sovereignty and territorial integrity and we will never tolerate or sit idly by while the splittists carry out their plot.
"The PLA will adopt all necessary measures to steadfastly smash any political adventure aimed at splitting [from] the mainland."
Defence minister Chi Haotian told Xinhua, the official news agency, "Taiwanese separatists are playing with fire and will end up burning themselves to death".
Premier Zhu Rongji included this warning in the official government work report, "We will not sit idly by and let separatist activity that aimed at undermining the motherland's sovereignty and territorial integrity". He specified that advocating the theory that Taiwan and China are two equal states, as Lee Teng-hui did last July, or calling for the independence of Taiwan would be considered "splittist".
On March 8, the Liberation Army Daily further revealed that General Chi had called on the army to actively prepare for war. PLA deputies filed a record 18 motions, including one for a "national mobilisation law", which would allow more convenient access to civilian contributions to strengthen the planned war defence system.
Zhu fired a further salvo when closing the 11-day meeting, rejecting in categorical terms independence for Taiwan, in whatever shade or form. He made a special effort to counter a recent remark by US president Bill Clinton that the threats across the Taiwan Straits must shift to dialogue, saying "Two words need to be changed. There must be a shift from threat to dialogue across the Pacific Ocean."
To back up its threats, Beijing asked the NPC deputies to approve a 12.7% rise in military spending, bringing the total war budget to 120.5 billion yuan. Though Taiwan wasn't the only reason for the rise in arms expenditure, the increase diverts precious resources away from important social needs.
The allocations for education in the coming year, for example, will be a pitiful 16.5 billion yuan, or 1% more than 1999. Beijing had earlier aimed to spend the equivalent of 4% of gross domestic product on education by the year 2000. That allocation will now be less than 3%. A mayor from Henan province revealed during the NPC session that many counties and townships were so poor that they could not even afford to provide the legally required nine years of free education.
Just over 70 billion yuan has been allocated as subsidies for laid-off workers — those displaced from state firms, declining industries and in poor provinces. This represents a drastic cut from last year's allocations of, according to minister of labour and social security Zhang Zuoji, 190 billion yuan.
Last year's lay-off subsidies were anything but adequate. Even by Zhang's own admission to the NPC, the large-scale redundancies from state firms had led to mass protests in "some parts of the country". He refused to quantify the protests but expressed the amazing view that the jobless are "a burden on society", as if they chose to let their jobs go.
Based on Zhang's own projection that 5 million more would become redundant this year, added to the official accumulated unemployment figure of 6.5 million, it is hard to see how the reduced jobless subsidies will meet need. Zhang further admitted that 10% of the unemployed were not covered by the social security network at all.
Strategic spending on the technological upgrading of state firms attracted allocations of only 16.5 billion yuan, and infrastructure projects — crucial in kick-starting China's deflating economy — were given 89.3 billion yuan.
Graft busting
Massive embezzlement by CP officials has long been undermining Beijing's income. The fallout from the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis was a further blow. Beijing has been borrowing to plug the gaps, and in the coming year it plans to raise 438 billion yuan through bond issues, a 16.5% rise from 1999.
Debt servicing has become a growing burden. Hard to track previously, the latest budget, tabled at the NPC meeting, included interest payments as part of national spending for the first time.
At last year's NPC meeting, the budget deficit projected for 1999 was 150.3 billion yuan; the actual deficit turned out to be 179.7 billion yuan. The projected deficit for 2000 is a record 229.9 billion yuan, 53% more than the projection for 1999.
A substantial part of deficit spending is clearly targeted at boosting the economy, which has been suffering from weak private consumption and sluggish exports. A grand plan to boost the (generally less developed) western provinces was launched at the NPC session. Some 70% of the government's borrowings and funds were scheduled to go to support such projects.
In an unconventional move, no formal projections were made on the country's economic growth, though officials suggested informally that 7% should be achievable. China's economy grew 7.1% during 1999.
Not unrelated to the pressure of dwindling government income, Beijing has launched a new campaign against corruption. It timed the execution of a corrupt senior official — Hu Changqing, former vice-governor of Jiangxi province — to occur during the NPC session.
Nearly 200 officials have been implicated in an ongoing investigation into a major smuggling racket in Xiamen, a port city in Fujian province, including the wife of CP politburo member Jia Qinglin. On the eve of the NPC meeting, Beijing announced that NPC vice-chairperson Cheng Kejie is the subject of a graft probe and couldn't attend the NPC.
How far this exercise will hurt the key culprits remains undetermined.
Unprecedented lack of unanimity
For reasons not exactly evident yet, a big number of NPC deputies weren't impressed. Four hundred and seventy four of the nearly 2800 deputies voted against the report of the Supreme People's Procuratorate, while 312 abstained. In China's tame parliament, where unanimous endorsement was nearly a matter of course only a few years ago, this large number of dissenting votes amounted to a near-coup.
Similarly, on the report of the Supreme People's Court, there were 412 votes against and 282 abstentions. The disapproving votes also appeared on other reports: the budget (199 votes against and 165 abstentions); the report by NPC chairperson Li Peng (108, 124); the draft 2000 plan for national economic and social development (68, 76); the draft Legislative Law (89, 129) and Zhu's government work report (21, 44).
Under the new Legislative Law, regional authorities retain the right to issue laws but must register them with the NPC, whose standing committee would have the power to change or nullify them.
Although technically China's "organ of supreme power" whose job it is to scrutinise the government, and even in spite of the increased dissent, the NPC is still far from a democratic institution. The CP continues to keep a tight grip on it. For example, in 11 of China's 31 provinces and state-administered cities, party secretaries continue to double as heads in the provincial or municipal people's congresses.
In an unconcealed move, Li Peng "reminded" the deputies that "all items of legislation and supervisory work undertaken by the NPC completely and thoroughly followed the line and policies of the party" and called on them to continue doing so.
Popular pressure to change this status quo has continued to pop up, especially around the time of NPC gatherings.
Believed to represent the view of a section of the dissident intellectuals, an article in the February issue of Yan-Huang Zisun boldly called for reforms to reverse the disenfranchisement of the Chinese people and the denial of their democratic and constitutional rights to select their government, to exercise free speech and to organise independent political parties.