In so many ways, the look of the National People's Congress is old school, a throwback to the heady days of the Cold War with its red flags, its hammers and sickles, its waves of applause from rows of disciplined deputies, and its pledges to unswervingly follow the socialist road.
But these days, the language is much more capitalist roader than Marxist Leninist.
Premier Li Keqiang closed China's most reform-minded annual parliament for many years last week with a series of pledges. He said the world's second- biggest economy would maintain economic expansion at a level strong enough to create new jobs but would also prioritise cleaner skies over slavish adherence to the government's 7.5 per cent growth target.
"What we care more about is the livelihood of our people," Li said. "The GDP growth we want brings real benefits to our people, helps raise the quality and efficiency of economic development and contributes to energy conservation and environmental protection."
Genuine reforms
Consumer spending is rising but not as fast as Beijing had hoped, and Beijing tried to kickstart this with a mini-stimulus plan last year, but he stressed that any further gains have to come from genuine, longer- term reforms. He reiterated Beijing's commitments to easing tax and regulatory burdens on entrepreneurs and open markets such as health care and financial service that are dominated by the state.
“We will carry out reform without hesitation,” he said.
The NPC was overshadowed by some downbeat data.
China’s February exports contracted by 18 per cent year on year, far below expectations with weakness across the board. The timing of the Chinese new year probably had a lot to do with the strength of January data and the weakness of February data, but the reactions to the fluctuations shows just how jumpy people are about the economy these days.
As we have noted previously in Asia Briefing , there is a hefty cadre of the superwealthy at the annual parliament and its advisory panel, about 86 dollar billionaires at last count.
Some of these billionaires have made their money from businesses that at first glance have little to do with Mao Zedong thought or Marxist dialectics.
Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi Tech, a smartphone and software firm which outsells Apple in China, is often compared to Steve Jobs, but he sees the success of his smartphone business, which is valued at about $10 billion and sells about four million phones a month, as very much in keeping with communist ideology.
Nothing is more socialist than the internet, he says. He is spearheading the concept of the “mass line”, a political concept pushed by the communist leadership to make the ruling party more accessible to the public, more transparent, and to do away with excessive bureaucracy.
“In the age of the internet, you need to be close to the market and friendly to users. I think [this strategy] is an interpretation of the concept of the mass line,” Lei told the Xinhua news agency in an interview on the sidelines of the NPC. Lei is a delegate at the NPC.
One Xiaomi phone model is designed based on ideas contributed by millions of users through its online forum, Lei said, adding that some Xiaomi fans have even helped to translate the interface into foreign languages.
It’s a kind of technological dictatorship of the proletariat. “The internet is amazing because it can easily approach and engage a mass of people,” Lei said. “Nothing can be more ‘mass line’ than a right attitude about the internet.”
Other tech gurus here share his view of the internet, including Robin Li, the head of China's biggest search engine Baidu.
'Traditional mindset'
"Business people from traditional industries, once they have the mindset, will use the internet to upgrade themselves," Li, a national political adviser, told a press conference at the event.
Delivering his government work report, premier Li Keqiang said the government would do its part to support the comrades building the internet, with a pledge to speed up 4G mobile network programmes, build 100M fibre optic networks in cities and extend broadband connectivity to villages.
Also he promised to promote the healthy development of internet finance as well as online retailing.
Intriguingly, there were a fair few shots of Robin Li using Xiaomi’s latest smartphone, the Mi3.