Foreign correspondents wait outside the Great Hall of the People before the opening session of the 2015 CPPCC on March 3. (PHOTO: CSST)

 

As this year’s “Two Sessions,” the gathering of China’s two highest representative bodies drew to a close, foreign scholars offered observations, analysis and speculation about what implications the meetings have for the future of reform and development in the country.

“With the ‘new normal,’ China has adopted some measures to provide social protection to the marginalized populations in both the rural and urban areas coping with China’s rapid urbanization,” said Rachel Murphy, head of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies and director of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford.
 

Such measures will “ultimately help economic restructuring” by stimulating domestic demand among a large number of those people, she said.
 

Professor Kerry Brown, director of the China Studies Center at the University of Sydney, showed his interest in how China will adapt to the new normal and whether the public will still have positive expectations for quality of life despite slower growth because of other more complex indicators and outcomes.
 

 “The declining growth rates may not be the real challenge for China’s economy in the first place,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said. “Investor and consumer trust is not only influenced by growth rates but also, for example, by such issues as transparency, stability and fairness of the rules of the economic and political game.” 
 

Patrick Mendis, a commissioner of the US National Commission for UNESCO, spoke favorably of President Xi Jinping’s “Four Comprehensives” platform, which includes building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform, governing by rule of law and establishing strict Party discipline. He referred to it as a positive blueprint for governance and said that the Chinese leader has established himself as a “philosopher-king.” This ideal of leadership is widely known in the West as part of the vision of a “just city” described in Plato’s Republic, a work that was highly influential on European political thought.
 

Over the years, different leaders have been associated with specific positions. Mao Zedong advocated Marxist and communist theories, while Deng Xiaoping developed Marxism in an innovative way and proposed the “reform and opening-up.” Xi’s “comprehensive” ideological framework encompasses previous leaders’ policy pronouncements, such as Deng’s idea of a “moderately prosperous society” through his “reform and opening-up” agenda. Xi’s “Four Comprehensives” places him among the “great reform-minded leaders” like Deng, Mendis said.
 

He also praised Xi’s leadership in the new campaign against corruption in the Party, state-owned Enterprises, and provincial and local government entities. “This works in parallel with his rule of law initiative,” he said.
 

In President Xi’s view, the Party’s anti-corruption movement is an expression of the themes of deepening reform and Party discipline that pervade the “Four Comprehensives” platform, Mendis said.

 

Jiang Hong and Maoli are reporters from Chinese Social Sciences Today.