Despite these advances, China’s telecommunications infrastructure has not been able to keep up with demand. A large proportion of the country’s population still has little or no access even to basic telephone service. Although the number of cellular phones has grown enormously, surpassing that for standard (i.e., landline) telephones in 2003, the overall ratio of phones per capita has nonetheless remained much smaller than it is for the developed countries. Internet use has also increased dramatically. Cheng-Siang Chen Kenneth G. Lieberthal The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Government and society
Parallel structure
Despite its size, the People’s Republic of China is organized along unitary rather than federal principles. Both the government and the Communist Party" class="md-crosslink">Chinese Communist Party (CCP; Pinyin: Zhongguo Gongchan Dang; Wade-Giles romanization: Chung-kuo Kung-ch’an Tang), moreover, operate “from the top down,” arrogating to the “Centre” all powers that are not explicitly delegated to lower levels. To run the country, the government and the CCP have established roughly parallel national bureaucracies extending from Beijing down to local levels. These bureaucracies are assisted by various “mass organizations”—e.g., trade unions, a youth league, women’s associations, and writers’ and other professional associations—that encompass key sectors of the population. These organizations, with their extremely large memberships, have generally served as transmission lines for communicating and uniformly implementing policies affecting their members. No voluntary associations are permitted to function that are wholly independent of CCP and government leadership.
The CCP and government bureaucracies themselves are organized along territorial and functional lines. The territorial organization is based on a number of administrative divisions, with both a CCP committee and a “people’s government” in charge of each. These territorial divisions include the national level in Beijing (the Centre), 33 provincial-level units (4 directly administered cities, 5 autonomous regions, the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions, and 22 provinces, excluding Taiwan), some 330 prefectural bodies, more than 2,850 county-level entities, and numerous cities, towns, and townships. Some larger cities are themselves divided into urban wards and counties. This territorial basis of organization is intended to coordinate and lend coherence to the myriad policies from the Centre that may affect any given locale.
The functionally based political organization is led on the government side by ministries and commissions under the State Council and on the CCP side by Central Committee departments. These central-level functional bodies sit atop hierarchies of subordinate units that have responsibility for the sector or issue area under concern. Subordinate functional units typically are attached to each of the territorial bodies.
This complex structure is designed to coordinate national policy (such as that toward the metallurgical industry), assure some coordination of policy on a territorial basis, and enable the CCP to keep control over the government at all levels of the national hierarchy. One unintended result of this organizational approach is that China employs more than 10 million officials—a number that exceeds the populations of many of the world’s countries.
There are tensions among these different goals, and thus a great deal of shifting has occurred since 1949. During the early and mid-1950s the government’s functional ministries and commissions at the Centre were especially powerful. The Great Leap Forward, starting in 1958, shifted authority toward the provincial- and lower-level territorial CCP bodies. During the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966, much of the political system became so disrupted that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was called in and assumed control. When the PLA fell under a political cloud, the situation became remarkably fluid and confused for much of the 1970s.
Since then the general thrust has been toward less-detailed CCP supervision of the government and greater decentralization of government authority where possible. But the division of authority between CCP and government and between territorial and functional bodies has remained in a state of flux, as demonstrated by a trend again toward centralization at the end of the 1980s and subsequent efforts toward decentralization since the late 1990s. The Chinese communist political system still has not become institutionalized enough for the distribution of power among important bodies to be fixed and predictable.
Constitutional framework
The fourth constitution of the People’s Republic of China was adopted in 1982. It vests all national legislative power in the hands of the National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee. The State Council and its Standing Committee, by contrast, are made responsible for executing rather than enacting the laws. This basic division of power is also specified for each of the territorial divisions—province, county, and so forth—with the proviso in each instance that the latitude available to authorities is limited to that specified by law.
All citizens 18 years of age and older who have not been deprived of their political rights are permitted to vote, and direct popular suffrage is used to choose People’s Congress members up to the county level. Above the counties, delegates at each level elect those who will serve at the People’s Congress of the next higher level. Were this constitution an accurate reflection of the real workings of the system, the People’s Congresses and their various committees would be critical organs in the Chinese political system. In reality, though, they are not.
Actual decision-making authority in China resides in the state’s executive organs and in the CCP. At the national level the top government executive organ is the State Council, which is led by the premier. The constitution permits the appointment of vice-premiers, a secretary-general, and an unspecified number of councillors of state and heads of ministries and commissions. The premier, vice-premiers, state councillors, and secretary-general meet regularly as the Standing Committee, in which the premier has the final decision-making power. This Standing Committee of the State Council exercises major day-to-day decision-making authority, and its decisions de facto have the force of law.
While it is not so stipulated in the constitution, each vice-premier and councillor assumes responsibility for the work of one or more given sectors or issues, such as education, energy policy, or foreign affairs. The leader concerned then remains in contact with the ministries and the commissions of the State Council that implement policy in that area. This division of responsibility permits a relatively small body such as the Standing Committee of the State Council (consisting of fewer than 20 people) to monitor and guide the work of a vast array of major bureaucratic entities. When necessary, of course, the Standing Committee may call directly on additional expertise in its deliberations. The National People’s Congress meets roughly annually and does only a little more than to ratify the decisions already made by the State Council.
Parallel to the State Council system is the central leadership of the CCP. The distribution of power among the various organs at the top of the CCP—the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau (Politburo), the Political Bureau itself, and the Secretariat—has varied a great deal, and from 1966 until the late 1970s the Secretariat did not function at all. There is in any case a partial overlap of membership among these organs and between these top CCP bodies and the Standing Committee of the State Council. In addition, formally retired elder members of the party have often exercised decisive influence on CCP decision making.