Annual Meeting of National People’s Congress Wednesday

Published on Author helvey

Happy Xi Jinping

The National People’s Congress of China will meet in Beijing on Wednesday at The Great Hall of the People for their annual gathering of China’s national legislature.  According to Carlos Tejada, this meeting is typically not an especially exciting event in terms of surprising new legislature being proposed or unexpected voting results.  All of the voting will likely have been determined beforehand by executive officials behind closed doors. In a guide printed for reporters, the NPC said, “no new laws or major law amendments are expected to be put before the legislators this year, and there will be no outstanding personnel changes for voting.”

Regardless, the gathering is a convenient opportunity for communicating “economic and policy goals for the year.”  The main topics to be addressed are an economic growth target, military spending, financial reform, social services, corruption, and national security.  For our purposes, it will be most interesting to see if China pursues their same economic growth goal of 7.5% this year, after surpassing that goal and growing 7.7% in 2013.  According to Tejada, most believe that reaching this goal will be more difficult in 2014 as “the economy matures.”

source: http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/03/04/what-to-expect-at-chinas-npc/

4 Responses to Annual Meeting of National People’s Congress Wednesday

  1. It seems a little counterintuitive to vote and then meet to discuss issues. But I guess the meeting may turn from hours of trying to convince people to vote a certain way, to trying to simply get everyone on the same page working for the same goals. It seems like this meeting is a formality if anything because it is hard to make solid changes in the economy when everything has already been voted on.

  2. China will mainly focus on its economic issues. I think China will (likely to) lower its growth goal since China needs to slow down and Xi Jinping wants to reform China’s banking system and its economy.

  3. Once in a while there’s a surprise at the NPC and a proposal either doesn’t pass or garners sufficient opposition to give leadership pause.
     
    But when one party dominates the legislature, we observe similar things even in elected legislatures: no bill brought to a vote ever gets defeated. The US is an oddity in this regard, as the House and Senate do not always see eye-to-eye, and when there are divided chambers (as at present) we see lots of grandstanding [40+ votes in the House to repeal ACA!].