李世默：这个百年，这个党（8）

An unprecedented restructuring of this system occurred at the Third Plenum. The decision-making mechanism of the regime has been extracted from the nearly sixty-year-old matrix structure and remade into a vertical agency apart from the party committee composition. The Discipline Inspection Commission at each level of government remains inside the party committee system but its functions are now independent of the party committee of that jurisdiction. Each DIC is being placed under the direct control of the DIC at the next highest level of government and ultimately under the Central Discipline Inspection Commission in Beijing. The CDIC will now have full authority over appointments of officials at all DIC’s at all levels nationwide. The initiation and investigation of all cases by a DIC are to be conducted autonomously from the parallel party committee and held accountable to the next highest DIC. As if to demonstrate the immediate effect of this restructuring, at the closing of the Third Plenum Beijing appointed a new head of the Shanghai Discipline Inspection Commission, an official from the capital.

To mirror the reform of the party’s internal inspection regime, the state’s legal system is being similarly restructured. The court systems at each jurisdiction will be held accountable not to its parallel government but to the next highest court. It is widely anticipated that the system will be further reformed to establish cross-jurisdictional courts, setting it further apart from local and regional authorities.

One cannot overstate the significance of these reforms to China’s future governance. It is the most qualitative change in the distribution and provision of power for the party in decades. China is an extremely large country with a highly complex governance mechanism. The introduction of an independent authority as a watchdog at each and every level of government is a dramatic move. If fully implemented, the new system will play a decisive role in curbing corruption and generally improve the efficacy of governance.

PARTY AND STATE

The Third Plenum’s most noticeable reorganization of political structure came with the establishment of the National Security Committee (NSC) and the Central Reform Leading Group (CRLG). Both are directly under the authority of the Politburo and its standing committee and, therefore, above the State Council (equivalent of the cabinet). A review of the historical context can help understand the importance of this development.

In 1949 when the party established the People’s Republic, it borrowed what was called the “three-carriages” model from the Soviet Union. Corresponding to the USSR’s Party Central Committee, the Supreme Soviet, and the Central Ministerial Conference, the CCP, in addition to its own party central committee, set up the National People’s Congress and the State Council. The former is the legislature let by a chairman and the latter is the cabinet run by the premier who is the head of government, and both are members of the Politburo’s standing committee. In recent decades, the General Secretary of the Party also serves as president who is the head of state. The “three carriages” are parallel in form. But the Constitution enshrines the centrality of the party’ s leadership of the whole nation.