Every March, Beijing puts on one of the world’s most meticulously staged political performances: the “Two Sessions,” the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Officially, these gatherings are presented as the center of China’s political system. The PRC Constitution describes the NPC as “the highest organ of state power,” while the CPPCC presents itself as a body for political consultation, democratic supervision, and participation in the deliberation and administration of state affairs (Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, 2018; CPPCC, n.d.).
On paper, the Two Sessions are supposed to represent legislation, consultation, and national participation. In reality, they do something else. What appears each year is not an open political process but a highly managed performance. Approximately 2000 delegates gather, read reports, applaud at the right moments, and television cameras capture row after row of solemn faces beneath the image of a disciplined and confident state.
That smoothness is precisely the point, but it is also what gives the event away. The Two Sessions are not where power is tested or challenged. They are where power is displayed. Their purpose of is not to open space for serious disagreement, but to show unity, order, and loyalty. The event is less about deliberation than affirmation, less about reaching consensus than performing it (Hass et al., 2026).
These decisions gave the session the appearance of parliamentary productivity, but not to shape the political line in any independent way, but to ratify decisions already made by the Party center.
In the Daodejing, Laozi writes that after the loss of Dao comes virtue; after the loss of virtue comes benevolence; after the loss of benevolence comes righteousness; and after the loss of righteousness comes ritual. Ritual, in this sequence, is not the highest form of order. It is what remains when deeper trust and moral substance have thinned out. It is a sign that living authority has weakened and must now rely on display.
The CCP wants the Two Sessions to project stability, authority, and collective purpose. But what makes the event revealing is the mechanical way it does so. This is not a parliament in any meaningful sense in competitive politics. It is not a place where major national questions are debated, or leaders face institutional accountability, or where policy can be opposed. The important decisions have already been made elsewhere before the meetings. What remains is the ritual of seemingly endorsement.
The meetings have all the outward signs of institutional life—reports, delegates, motions, votes—but with almost none of the uncertainty that gives those forms real substance. the final outcomes are overwhelmingly one-sided. In 2026, for example, the new law on ethnic unity and progress passed by 2,756 votes in favor, 3 against, and 3 abstentions (Reuters, 2026c). Numbers like that are not signs of robust parliamentary life. They are signs of a system in which visible unanimity matters more than real contestation.
The existence of a formal procedure or ritual does not prove the existence of meaningful democratic politics, despite Xi Jinping’s claim that it constitutes the whole democratic process. When outcomes are already settled before the procedure, the procedure becomes theater. That is what the Two Sessions have become: a ritualized legislative performance in which the forms of politics remain, but the uncertainty, friction, and independence that make those forms meaningful have largely disappeared.
Officials within such a system, including those delegates, quickly learn what is rewarded and what is dangerous. Independent judgment, candor, and deviation from approved language carry risks. Under those conditions, people begin to sound alike because they have to. They were cautious, formulaic, and imitative. Over time, the system loses much of its ability to think clearly about complexity, because everyone is learning to operate within the same narrow vocabulary. The leadership demands not only obedience but uniformity. Once uniformity becomes a political ideal, vitality drains out of public life.
Of course, every political order has its ceremonies, symbols, and protocols. The problem is not the ceremony itself, but that when the ceremony becomes heavy and a priority, trust becomes thin. The regime relies so much on managed language, visual order, slogans, and rehearsed confidence because it cannot rest comfortably on openness, candid feedback, or unforced legitimacy.
Brookings described the 2026 meeting as a highly choreographed session that would signal policy continuity under Xi’s leadership rather than genuine political contestation (Hass et al., 2026). Ceremony stands where candor ought to be. Rehearsed unanimity stands where argument ought to be. Choreography takes the place of legitimacy.
The danger of such a system is not only that it misleads the public. In time, it also misleads itself.
When officials learn that safety lies in repeating approved formulas, information begins to warp as it travels upward. Bad news is softened. Failure is renamed. Doubt becomes dangerous. Before long, the system hears less and less of what it most needs to know.
The Two Sessions is no setting to question or challenge power. They are where reality is force-translated into acceptable political language. Year after year, it teaches officials that appearance is safer than candor, and that fluency in the official script is more valuable than honest judgment.
Furthermore, the more authority is drawn upward, the less likely those below are to offer candid correction. Most do not need to be directly silenced, they silence themselves. That is why the calm of the Two Sessions is misleading. It reflects a system skilled at suppressing contradiction from public view. Delegates do not function as meaningful checks on power. They function as its echo. Consensus is not worked out through friction but is presented as a finished fact.
This ritualized political culture does not stay inside the Great Hall of the People. It shapes governance more broadly. The safest bureaucrat is often the one who demonstrates the most visible zeal.
That pattern was clear during Zero-COVID, when local authorities often enforced policies with extreme severity because over-enforcement was politically safer than appearing lax. The same pattern has appeared in administrative excess and ideological overperformance across China.
At the Two Sessions, the CCP does not merely speak about policy. It speaks in the language of mission, rejuvenation, and historical purpose. It casts its goals in morally elevated terms. Yet such moralizing language is constantly paired, ironically, with centralization and coercion.
The ethnic unity law passed in March 2026 is a good example. Officially, it promotes solidarity and national integration. In practice, it broadens the legal framework through which minority cultures, languages, and identities must comply with and integrate into the state-centered national narrative (Reuters, 2026c).
The more insistently the Party praises its own virtue, the more carefully one should ask what that performance is trying to cover. A genuinely confident political order does not need endless self-congratulation nor an annual gathering to function as moral theater. When power praises itself too often, the praise begins to sound less like confidence than insecurity.
The PRC Two Sessions are not signs of living or natural political confidence but rather of a ritualized display after the erosion of trust, candor, and self-correction. Their order is the order of choreography: polished, repetitive, and brittle. Their unity is staged, not the deeper unity born from truth, trust, and political honesty.
Xi Jinping has fused propaganda, centralization, surveillance, and ceremonial unanimity into a single governing style. The Two Sessions condense that style into visible form. They offer consultation without real contestation, participation without genuine independence, and authority without receptivity to truth.
The grandeur of the Two Sessions does not reveal the confidence of a healthy political order. It reveals a regime that must keep staging legitimacy because it no longer trusts legitimacy to stand on its own.
Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. (n.d.). Main functions of the CPPCC. CPPCC official website.
Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. (2018). National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China.
Hass, R., Czin, J. A., Pearson, M. M., Chan, K., Wei, C., Horsley, J. P., Fu, D., & others. (2026, March 3). What to look out for at this year’s meeting of China’s legislature. Brookings Institution.
Reuters. (2026a, March 5). VIEW China sets 2026 growth target at 4.5%-5%, below last year’s pace.
Reuters. (2026b, March 3). What to watch for in China’s 2026–2030 five-year plan.
Reuters. (2026c, March 12). China passes new ethnic minority law, prioritizing the use of Mandarin.
Reuters. (2026d, March 3). Key economic targets to watch at China’s parliament meeting.
Xinhua. (2026a, March 13). Recalibrating officials’ understanding of governance and development.
Xinhua. (2026b, March 12). China adopts law on national development planning.