A window into the Chinese government has now closed
For more than three decades, the Chinese premier’s annual news conference was the only time a top leader answered questions from journalists about the state of the country. It was the only opportunity for the public to determine for themselves China’s No. 2 official. It was the only moment when some Chinese could feel a vague sense of political participation in a country without elections.
On Monday, China announced that the prime minister’s press conference, which marks the end of the country’s annual legislature, will no longer take place. With this step, an important institution of the Chinese reform era was no longer an important institution.
“Welcome to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” wrote one commenter on the social media platform Weibo, echoing the sentiment that China is becoming increasingly like its dictatorial, Hermitic neighbor. The search term “news conference” was censored on Weibo, and by Monday evening, Beijing time, there were very few comments left.
Although increasingly scripted, the Prime Minister’s press conference at the National People’s Congress was watched by the Chinese public and the world’s political and business elite for signs of economic policy shifts and, occasionally, high-level power plays that happened beneath the surface.
“As staged as it was, it was a window into how official China works and how official China explains itself to the Chinese people and to the rest of the world,” said Charles Hutzler, a former colleague of mine who led 24 premier pressers attended. since 1988 as a journalist for the Voice of America, The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.
The decision to scrap the press conference reflects the dire economic conditions China faces and the leadership’s growing tendency to put the country in a black box. And there is an obvious conclusion: Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, is the only one in charge of a country of 1.4 billion people.
The press conference’s demise also erased the last vestiges of the reform era.
In the 1990s and 2000s, China had two major television events every year: the annual Lunar New Year TV Gala and the annual press conference with the Prime Minister. (Think of the Super Bowl and the Oscars in the United States, even more so because China had few TV channels and the Internet was new.)
The first memorable political TV moment for many Chinese came in November 1987. Outgoing Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang mingled with foreign correspondents at a reception at the end of the Communist Party Congress. Talkative and smiling, he answered Questions: Was there a power struggle within the party between the reformers and the conservatives? Was there freedom in China? Where was his neat double-breasted suit made? Mr. Zhao, who was elected party secretary-general at the congress, even said: “I personally believe that I am more suitable for the position of prime minister. But they all wanted me to become general secretary.”
Such a public statement from a Chinese official would be unthinkable today.
Mr. Zhao was later fired for opposing the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989. He died while under house arrest. The translation and the video It appears from the reception that he avoided the questions, except for the one about his suit. (The suit came from a tailoring house in Beijing called Hongdu, or Red Capital.)
The press conference with the Prime Minister was institutionalized in 1993, but only became a must-see TV event when Zhu Rongji, a sharp-tongued and good-humored Prime Minister, took the stage in 1998. he stated, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a minefield or a bottomless abyss, I will move forward without hesitation.”
That event was so popular that two people involved gained national fame: one woman journalist from a Hong Kong television station asking a question, and a female State Department employee who interpreted for him in English.
Mr Zhu’s successor, Wen Jiabao, did not make big news until his last press conferences, in 2012. talked about China’s need for political reform — about the last time a top Chinese leader raised it — foreshadowed the downfall of Bo Xilai, a political rival of Mr. Xi.
Li Keqiang, who served as prime minister under Xi for a decade and spent much of the time on the sidelines of his dominant boss, scored a point for transparency in 2020 when he said that about 600 million Chinese, or 43 percent of the population, a monthly income of about $140. His comments blew a hole in Xi’s claim that China is fighting poverty. When Mr. Li died unexpectedly last October, many Chinese people went online to thank him for speaking the truth.
The prime ministers largely used the location to answer questions from the international media and discuss economic and foreign policy. According to a 2013 article in a state-backed publication, Mr. Zhu, Mr. Wen and Mr. Li each answered nearly half of questions from foreign media at the first news conferences.
The prime minister’s press conferences, attended by as many as 700 journalists each year, were originally intended to provide foreign media with interview opportunities so they could better understand China, the article said.
Under Mr Xi, the Chinese government has expelled and harassed foreign journalists, raided the offices of multinational companies and become embroiled in disputes with major trading partners. Stopping the press conference will make China more isolated and less transparent to the outside world. That does not bode well for the economy.
One possible reason for the cancellation is that China faces its most serious economic challenges in decades. But the country has been through difficult periods before, including the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and the global financial crisis of 2008. Prime ministers then had no trouble communicating the country’s policies to the public and the world.
The question is to what extent China, under Mr Xi’s leadership, values open communication. Media and internet censorship is the toughest in decades.
Many China watchers speculated that the death of the press conference could be an attempt at self-preservation by current Premier Li Qiang. Mr Li was Mr Xi’s chief of staff in the eastern province of Zhejiang in the 2000s and owes his position to Mr Xi.
Since taking office last March, Mr Li has minimized the status and influence of his role. He flew chartered flights instead of the equivalent of Air Force One, which he is entitled to, making Mr Xi the only one to enjoy this status. He reduced the frequency of meetings of the Chinese cabinet, which the prime minister chairs. from weekly to a few times a month. His portraits do not appear on the website of the cabinet. They were also not on major news portals on Tuesday when he delivered the government’s work report, an annual ritual for the prime minister. As usual, headlines and portraits of Mr Xi dominated these sites.
Mr Li canceled his press conference, a commentator wrote on X, probably not because he lacks eloquence. “It was probably because Li Qiang felt that he would become the center of the media at the press conference, overshadowing the brilliance of the Secretary General,” the commentator wrote, referring to Mr Xi. “He hopes to remain the secretary-general’s shadow forever.”