By Jules Quartly

From this outsider's perspective looking in, the annual sessions of China's top legislature and political advisory body appear to be remarkably harmonious.

By the end the first session of the 11th CPPCC National Committee, 4,772 proposals had been raised, covering agriculture, healthcare, education, employment, social security, housing, environmental protection and food and drug policies.

But among the suggestions and polite discussion there seems to have been little time left to argue. There was none of the obvious cut-and-thrust that characterizes politics elsewhere.

Legislative sessions in the United States, much of Europe and in many Asian countries, for example, often feature a lot of grandstanding, with politicians arguing their cases and being shot down by members of the political opposition. Prime minister's question time in England is a bit like bear baiting. Politicians wait their turn to savage the leader and when they smell blood jump in for the kill with a rhetorical lunge.

This was termed "adversary politics" by the scholar S. E. Finer and characterized as "a stand-up fight between two adversaries for the favor of the lookers-on".

This raises the question: When does the arguing happen? Before the NPC-CPPCC? Or after? Is Chinese politics really so harmonious? As an outsider, I thought it prudent to ask the insiders, journalists who know how the system works.

One reporter who is covering the sessions said there were, in fact, differences between delegates and their disagreements were public. She pointed to the case of the "symbolic city" planned in the hometown of Confucius in Shandong province.

The 300-sq-km city is intended to revive traditional values and will be a site for national ceremonies. It is projected to cost about 30 billion yuan ($4.2 billion).

Even so, this did not deter CPPCC member and president of the Anhui Dramatists' Association Hou Lu from speaking up. She said she was a taxpayer and didn't want her money thrown away on a white elephant, then wrote a counter-proposal and started a petition against it.