China Newspeak

China's constitution roller-coaster

The idea of “ruling in accord with the constitution” has experienced ups and downs ever since Xi Jinping came to power.

Nov 6, 2014

Introduced boldly early in Xi Jinping’s term in office, the idea of “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution” has peaked, fallen and reemerged over the past two years. “Red Alert,” photo by Michel Filion available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
On December 4, 2012, Xi Jinping made a speech in Beijing to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the promulgation and implementation of China’s constitution. This speech attracted a great deal of attention both inside and outside China. In the speech, Xi Jinping said: “Rule of the nation by law means, first and foremost, ruling the nation in accord with the constitution; the crux in governing by laws is to govern in accord with the constitution” (依法治国首先是依宪治国，依法执政关键是依宪执政).
For Xi Jinping to use the words “first and foremost” and “crux” in these remarks represented a marked departure from the language of his predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
But in 2013, in the midst of the “Seven Don’t Speaks” (七不讲) policy and a wave of anti-constitutionalism rhetoric, this pair of Xi Jinping terms disappeared from official discourse altogether. They even became, we could say, sensitive terms.
As I wrote in “The Missing Speech,” when the Central Propaganda Department published a book last summer called A Primer of Important Speeches by General Secretary Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping’s December 2012 speech on constitutionalism was unaccountably left out of the collection.
Finally, on September 5, 2013, in a speech to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the National People’s Congress, President Xi again used his two-part phrase: “Rule of the nation by law means, first and foremost, ruling the nation in accord with the constitution,” he said. “The crux in governing by laws is to govern in accord with the constitution.”
As Xi’s speech was reported in the official People’s Daily, the six-month disappearance of this political phrase was finally ended. However, the phrase went silent again immediately after the People’s Daily report, resurfacing only after the “communique” (公报) for the 4th Plenum was released in late October.
Searching for the pair of terms between December 2012 and October 2014 in three separate databases — the People’s Daily (PD coverage alone, full text); WiseNews (100+ mainland papers, full text and headline search); Baidu.com (covering all mainland news sites) — I arrived at the following results, which show a clear pattern across all three databases. The bottom two graphs are both for WiseNews, the headline search on the left and the full text search on the right.

In December 2012, soon after Xi Jinping came to power, the terms “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution” and “governing in accord with the constitution” appeared in six separate articles in the People’s Daily. In October 2014, the terms appeared in 16 articles in the People’s Daily, all but one of these after October 20, telling us they were closely related to the 4th Plenum.
The WiseNews database tells us that in December 2012 there were a total of 126 articles in mainland Chinese newspapers mentioning the two terms somewhere in the full text. After a period of 21 months with no use of the terms whatsoever, they appear in 514 articles in October this year.
This roller coaster ride of official discourse is not without its reasons. Some friends of mine who observe political events in China will say that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t match its words with deeds and so there’s no sense in paying attention to the way it deploys language. But I believe we can, if we observe China’s political discourse carefully, glimpse the drift, collision and upheaval of the tectonic plates of Chinese politics.
The discourse of the Chinese Communist Party can be divided into five categories I label as follows: “cosmetic language” (脂粉语), “body hair language” (皮毛语), “banner language” (旗帜语), “gate of life language” (命门语) and “pointing language” (要穴语).
The first two types, including the “cosmetic language” the Party uses to sing its own praises (“representing the interests of the masses,” etcetera) and the “body hair language” of rigid but mostly meaningless formalism (like talk of “socialist core values”), can be disregarded in terms of their significance in reading political affairs in China.
By contrast, “banner language” — terms like the “Three Represents” (三个代表) of Jiang Zemin — do merit our attention as markers of the legacies and perhaps agendas of top leaders. (Note that Xi Jinping’s “banner term” is still not clear, and the “Chinese dream” doesn’t quite fit the bill.)
Examples of “gate of life language” would include fundamental principles that the Party cannot and will not dispense with. Take, for example, the “Four Basic Principles” (四项基本原则), of which the core principle is the leadership of the CCP.
Finally, there are terms like “political system reforms” (政治体制改革) or “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution” (依宪治国) which can be exceptionally sensitive directional pointers about where the Party intends to go, or how it intends to change. Behind the ebb and flow of this “pointing language” we can see the fierce tug-of-war of Chinese politics.
High and mighty advocacy of “constitutional rule” (依宪) certainly does not equal true love or acceptance of the Constitution or constitutionalism, but the erasure and denial of “constitutional rule” as reflected in the official discourse does offer conclusive proof that forces within the Chinese Communist Party are acting out their hatred of, and opposition to, this idea.
At the same time, both inside and outside the Chinese Communist Party, there are still forces in pursuit of constitutionalism and democracy. Of late, these forces are exceptionally weak — but they hang on still, holding still and making no sound.
When Xi Jinping first spoke of “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution”, the well-regarded journal Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋), Southern Weekly and others grew somewhat bolder in their support. This was followed by a vicious wave of anti-constitutionalism that accounted for the dramatic disappearance of both of Xi Jinping’s terms, “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution” (依宪治国) and “governing in accord with the constitution” (依宪执政).
The anti-constitutionalism wave did not by any means root out support for the idea of constitutionalism, and as soon as the curtain closed on the 4th Plenum a number of media rushed to do special reports on “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution.” The following are several examples.