BEIJING: A special symposium hosted by President Xi Jinping 10 months ago has remained an inspiring experience for Pan Jiuren, a deputy headmaster of a primary school in central China’s Hunan Province.
Pan, a rural teacher for 28 years, raised several problems facing rural education, including the shortage of teachers, particularly well-trained ones, at the symposium held on Sept. 17, 2020, in the provincial capital Changsha. “General Secretary [Xi] listened attentively when we raised the problems. Even now when I recall the meeting, it induces a feeling of warmth,” Pan told Xinhua.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, summoned the meeting to solicit ideas from people at the grassroots for the 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) on the country’s economic and social development, which was being drafted then. From July to September in 2020, he hosted seven such symposiums, meeting ordinary citizens from various walks of life, including migrant workers, farmers, truck drivers and restaurant owners.
Ordinary people also contributed their wisdom to the drafting through more than 1 million comments online in August last year. It has been one of the many examples of how the CPC Central Committee, with Xi at its core, tried to make the people’s democracy sounder, more extensive and adequate. “The very purpose of the CPC’s leadership of the people in developing people’s democracy is to guarantee and support their position as masters of the country,” Xi said at a key gathering in 2014.
Liu Zhengdong, senior partner of the Shanghai-based MHP Law Firm, still has fresh memories from the day when Xi visited the Gubei civic center in the city’s Changning District on Nov. 2, 2019. “We were having a heated discussion about a draft law,” Liu recalled. The civic center is one of the community-level contact stations set up by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC). Draft laws are sent down here so that ordinary citizens can discuss and have their opinions heard by lawmakers. Over 1,300 opinions were collected through these offices last year, contributing to 16 pieces of legislation, said Tong Weidong, a legislative official with the NPC Standing Committee.
“People’s democracy is a type of whole-process democracy. All major legislative decisions are made through due procedure and after democratic deliberation. It is a scientific and democratic decision-making process,” Xi said.
The compilation of the Civil Code is a vivid epitome of “open-door legislation” and democratic legislation.
During the compilation process, the NPC Standing Committee deliberated the draft 10 times, solicited 10 rounds of public opinion, and organized three sessions for NPC deputies to discuss the draft. At the NPC annual session in 2020, over 100 amendments were made in light of opinions from various parties. Xi chaired three high-level Party meetings from 2016 to 2019 to hear the reports on the compilation of the code and gave important instructions.
The NPC, China’s national legislature, has displayed a broad representation of the people. Among the nearly 3,000 deputies to the 13th NPC, 15.7 percent are workers and farmers, up 2.28 percentage points over that of the 12th NPC.
–The Daily Mail-CGTN News exchange item
