By Qian Gang | Posted on 2014-11-06
The recent 4th Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party introduced a policy document with the long-winded title, Decision on Major Issues Concerning the Comprehensive Promotion of Rule of the Nation in Accord with the Law (关於全面推进依法治国若干问题的决定). One key takeaway of the “Decision” is the return of a pair of phrases that for some period of time had disappeared from official media coverage in China — “ruling the nation in accord with the constitution” (依宪治国) and “governing in accord with the constitution” (依宪执政).
For some background on these terms, readers can turn to two pieces I posted back in September, “The Missing Speech” and “Xi’s Missing Terms Emerge Again.”
[ABOVE: 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.
For detail please visit here