ABSTRACT
The system of Chinese People’s Congresses has increasingly attracted scholarly attention and the coverage of mass media in the West mainly for two reasons. Some people have noticed that the PCs have used their power in a more assertive manner and have contested with the government, the judicial branch, and the Party. In contrast, some other people have been more impressed by their achievements in terms of institution building. Consequently, in order to measure how much power the PCs really have, the scholarly studies have clustered into either a power-centered or an institution-centered approach. The former approach attempts to assess the power of China’s PCs by examining their relations over time with other traditionally more powerful institutions – looking for changes, if any. According to Robert Dahl, by allowing for political contestation, competition, rivalry, and opposition, a hegemonic regime can turn itself into a polyarchy (Dahl 1971 and 1973; McLennan 1973). Contestation between China’s PCs and other power institutions within the society, namely, the elite contestation within a power establishment, is significant so that outsiders may grasp the changing nature of Chinese political system, especially as this may impact the issue of democratization. However, some studies have attempted to estimate the power of the PCs by assessing their institutional maturity, the extent of their institutionalization, their legislative activities, access to power resources and staff support, the qualifications of PDs and legislative leaders, their standing among ordinary citizens, and so forth (Lin 1992-3 and 1993; O’Brien and Li 1993-4; Ding 1994; O’Brien 1994a; MacFarquhar 1998). Tensions between these two approaches, which I here summarize as contestation-first versus institutionalization-first, seem to have already been developed among the Chinese legislative studies.
