Chairman Wang Yan opened the annual conference of the Chinese National People’s Congress on Thursday. It is expected that the regime will ignore the call for research into the Chinese approach to the corona crisis and will mainly use the meeting to praise itself.
The National People’s Congress will sit on Friday. It consists of nearly three thousand delegates elected by the Chinese provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities and the armed forces.
Under the 1982 Chinese constitution, the People’s Congress is the most powerful organ of the Chinese state, but in reality it is completely subordinate to the Communist Party. The party drafts most of the new legislation and submits it to the NVC for consideration.
It is inevitable that the coronavirus will also keep people busy at the annual congress. However, political analysts expect that little attention will be paid to requests for research into the origin and the Chinese approach to the virus.
Criticism at home and abroad
“The government not only wants to preserve political stability in its own country, but also to prevent the international community from having an excuse to blame China,” political scientist Chen Daoyin of the University of Shanghai told the South China Morning Post.
Western intelligence agencies say the Chinese government is manipulating corona outbreak figures. An EU report released in late April concluded that the Chinese regime was spreading disinformation about the virus on social media.
The US government also states that COVID-19 comes from a laboratory in Wuhan. That is contradicted by the CIA, and the Trump cabinet has yet to present any evidence for that theory. The US risks withdrawing from the WHO health organization if it fails to demonstrate independence from Chinese influence in the short term.
Chinese activists who insist on more transparency about the crisis in their own country are being whistled back by the authorities. Zhang Xuezhong, a constitutional lawyer who wrote an open letter to delegates to the National People’s Congress criticizing the government and calling for freedom of expression, was arrested last Monday and detained for a day. An art project to design a burial site for corona victims was stopped by order of the police.
“Notable superiority of the Chinese system”
So it is expected that the Chinese delegates will mainly talk about the successes on Friday.
President Xi Jinping set the tone during a May 8 speech. “The experience we have gained in the fight against COVID-19 has once again demonstrated the strong vitality and remarkable superiority of the Chinese system,” he said. “It can overcome any obstacle and make huge contributions to the progress of human civilization.”
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The coronavirus in short
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