China’s most important annual political event, the convocation of the National Committee of Chinese People’s political consultative conference (CPPCC) and the National People’s Congress, (NPC) otherwise known as the “Two sessions” would wrap up in Beijing this week. The CPPCC is a top advisory body with a broad representation of all social strata, including ethnic nationalities, democratic political parties, and even personages without political affiliation in China. The CPPCC is the foremost political expression of China’s consultative democracy. Its background is rooted in the broad patriotic united front of all Chinese people in the struggle and construction of modern China.
The CPPCC was the historic platform under which the Communist Party of China and other democratic parties founded the modern China in 1949 and served also as legislative platform, until the National People’s Congress, the country’s parliament and supreme state organ was established in 1954. The CPPCC has since then reverted to its role as a national top advisory body and national dialogue mechanism that is both broadly representative and consultative.
As a top deliberative institution for national dialogue, the CPPCC drive democratic consultations and build a national consensus around key issues, and delivers vital inputs into the state’s strategic planning and policy choices. The China’s political system of multiparty consultation and cooperation with the Communist Party of China at the core is particularly affirmed and expressed in the work of the CPPCC and NPC. The National People’s Congress (NPC) is the supreme state organ and the nation’s top legislature. Both CPPCC and NPC are political formula of broad national inclusion offering a deliberative and legislative platform on topical issues of national significance and importance.
The two core representative institutions give strategic coherence to critical national conversations.
The “two sessions” of the top deliberative and legislative bodies, about to end its annual meetings in Beijing have both lived up to their historic mandates by addressing themselves to the vital national issues of China’s most intense political and economic projects.
Late last year, at the 5th plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) focused on deliberation and outline of the 14th five-year development plan, an important decision on a new economic formula, most suitable to China’s contemporary reality was developed. The dual circulation, an economic model that puts into context China’s specific national condition extrapolating both the opportunities and constraints of the international environment was high on the agenda.
The dual circulation holds that the country would take the domestic environment as primary while letting the domestic and the external environments to engage in a robust and dynamic interaction.
The blueprint of China’s economic strategy in the next five years and even beyond would not only enable the country to develop its economy, technologies and overall strength but also would offer great opportunities to businesses across the world to access and share in the growing prosperity of the country.
As the tradition with the two top Chinese Advisory and legislative bodies, the ‘two sessions’ of this year, the CPPCC has through open consultation and dialogue provided the broad consensus to the issue of new national economic strategy while the NPC has given it the force of the law, with both institutions signaling to the governing Communist Party and the government that they both have the broad legitimate mandate and approval of the Chinese people to deepen reform and take it, to the next level.
The concept of quality development is against the background of the understanding of the country’s principal contradiction of the people’s ever-growing need for a better life and the imbalance and inadequacy of development and for which the strategy of quality development is the key to its resolution.
Already, according to Premier Li Keqiang in his address to the NPC on the work report of the government, he said that “a target of over 6 percent will enable all of us to devote full energy to promoting reform, innovation and high-quality development.”
Historically and since the 1960s, only a few of over hundred middle-income countries and regions have become high-income economies as they shifted their development models from qualitative expansion to qualitative improvement. By contrast, those countries, and region that stagnated or even regressed, failed to realize the fundamental change to qualitative improvement.
And for China to escape the middle-income trap, it must pursue high-quality development. As a key significant feature of China’s modernization is to continuously improve people’s wellbeing as recently exemplified in the country’s conquest of absolute poverty, China has always focused on the people-centered philosophy of development and the framework of the current economic paradigm of quality-development would drive the new trajectory of improving people’s livelihood. The draft outline of the 14th Five-year plan (2021-2024) contains series of measures which includes increasing people’s income, boasting employment, building a high-quality system, and improved multi-level social security system among others. Within the framework of quality development, the country would take the pursuit of stellar scientific and technological breakthroughs and innovation as the central object of its modernization drive.
Maintaining and improving China’s strategic economic fundamentals would not only offer robust and inclusive growth but would enhance global recovery in the post-pandemic era.
Africa and Nigeria in particular have huge takeaways from the purposeful and focused Chinese most important annual political season of the ‘two sessions’, and the fact that maintaining stable growth, inclusive development, and driving a modernization that leaves no one behind is a rigorous process of interrogating one’s own reality, and defining policy roadmap that is strictly relevant to practical problem-solving.
Despite the fanfare of the annual gatherings of the two sessions, it is not a jamboree but a serious and determined national effort of the Chinese people to interrogate their existing social reality in the context of its specific national condition and the broader international environment, with a view to serve the people more wholeheartedly.
No Chinese key political season passes away without recording a key milestone in the overall trajectory to improving the people’s quality of life and that is why Nigeria and the rest of Africa should pay attention to how Beijing governs.
Onunaiju, is director, Centre for China Studies Abuja, Nigeria.
