Being the ruling party, the CPC is at the core of the country's leadership, while other parties (known as "democratic parties") in China are participating parties. The people's congress has no congressional party groups.

The people's congress exercises state power in a unified way, and the governments, the people's court and the people's procuratorate are responsible to the people's congress and subject to its oversight. This kind of formation is different from the Western model, which separates the powers of the three departments.

Deputies to the people's congress are elected from every region, ethnic group and sector of society of the country, and there is at least one deputy from each ethnic minority group no matter how small its population is. They therefore broadly represent the masses of the people instead of a single party or a group, the way as the members of Western parliament and congress do.

Wu called on lawmakers to maintain the correct political orientation by upholding the leadership of the CPC.

Wu's remarks were viewed as a response to the advocation by some people that the Western style multiple party system should be introduced into China, and that the system with the separation of three powers and a two-chamber parliament should be created in the socialist country.

The work report won applause from the lawmakers, who also noticed the unusual long time the top legislator used to stress the "essential differences" between China and Western political systems.

Lin Qiang, a member of the NPC Standing Committee who has been an NPC deputy for 11 years, said it was rare to see such systemic and detailed explication on these differences in former NPC Standing Committee work reports.

"With the explication of the characteristics of Chinese political system, we refuted the saying by some people that China's political restructuring lags behind the economic reform and the country should learn from Western countries in the political field," Lin said.

Dai Zhongchuan, deputy dean of the Law School of Huaqiao University and a deputy to the NPC, said every country should adopt a political system that suits its national conditions, while simply copying others will never succeed.

Dai gave the "convincing example" of the United States, whose political system is quite different from that in Britain, despite the two countries share a similar culture background and that the United States used to be a colony of Britain.

"Now we have the opportunity to see how the Western democracy runs on Internet and TV. To my fellow villagers' astonishment, they saw foreign parliament members always quarrel, and sometimes they fight in a boxing way. We all do not want to see this situation in China," said NPC deputy Zhang Liansheng, who is also the Party chief of a village in the eastern Fujian Province.

One of the political advantages of the socialist political system is that it always accumulate resources to accomplish large undertakings, Dai said, such as the disaster relief in last year's devastating earthquake and the success holding of the dazzling Beijing Olympic Games.

"But a lot of foreign countries, even some Western countries including the United States, sometimes can not do this job very well, because they are unable to concentrate their strength, an obvious shortcoming of their political systems," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 9, 2009)