60-year-old congress' vitality recipe
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E-mail Xinhua, March 6, 2014
The Internet and new media channels, major platforms for rising critical voices, are only one of many challenges and changes that the 60-year-old People's Congress is facing.
Only through ceaseless self-improvement will the system bring vitality to itself, making it more justified to be China's fundamental political system.
In January, top legislator Zhang Dejiang urged the congress system to make itself "keep pace with the times" through nonstop improvement.
Neither is there a perfect political system nor a universally fitting one. For a country, the fittest is the best.
The unique Oriental way of empowering its people, which has seen the nation's drastic transformation to the world's second-largest economy, has been an effective means of governing the world's most populous country.
But the system, like its Western counterparts which normally feature partisan politics and a power division but sometimes end up with endless parliamentary bickering and money-driven liberal democracy, is not perfect.
More need to be done for the country's legislators to wield the law-making and supervisory power vested in them by the 1.3 billion Chinese.
The latest reminder was the massive election fraud in central China's Hengyang City involving 56 lawmakers elected to the provincial people's congress on a tide of 18.1 million U.S. dollars in bribes.
One day before this year's NPC session opening on Wednesday, its spokeswoman vowed "zero tolerance" of election fraud. That shows the willingness to improve. The resolution needs to be translated into concrete actions.
It is fair to say that whether the 60-year-old system will further China's success story in the next 60 years hinges on its willingness to become better.
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