From “Rubber Stamps” to “Iron Stamps”: The Emergence of Chinese Local People's Congresses as Supervisory Powerhouses

This article analyses Chinese local people's congresses' supervision of governments in order to see whether people's congresses have played a meaningful role in the reform era. The article will show that the main strategies of people's congresses have been to gain the support of the Chinese Communist Party and to co-operate with governments, rather than to use confrontation, in an effort to overcome their lower political status. But after primarily achieving these goals by the early 1990s, people's congresses have also started to employ the confrontation strategy towards governments. At the same time, people's congresses have actively pioneered new supervisory measures so that they overcome current problematic legal and legislative systems. As a result, legislative supervision began to influence governments and officials significantly in the early 1990s. So people's congresses, along with the Party and governments, have become important political actors in local politics, even though they are not as influential as the other two institutions.