HOW many parties does it take to run a one-party state? Although the Communist Party is in sole charge, China also has eight other legally registered ones. It calls this a system of “multiparty co-operation”, which involves “sharing weal or woe”. The role of the non-Communist groups is to add a veneer of democracy. Ordinary people dismiss them as “flower vases”—pure decoration.

On March 1st Luo Fuhe, a senior leader of one such misleadingly named party, the Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy, challenged that description. He told reporters that his party had a proposal to make. Amid a sweeping crackdown on dissent, it was a remarkable one. Mr Luo said China’s “strict” controls on the internet should be relaxed to avoid hampering the country’s scientific and economic development. Rarely has a prominent member of the establishment taken such aim at China’s “great firewall”, which blocks access to many foreign websites (including this newspaper’s). Even more strikingly, some official newspapers reported his views. The delight of China’s long-suffering netizens was palpable.

Like the other “democratic” parties, as the non-Communist ones are officially described, Mr Luo’s was founded before 1949 when the Communists seized power. One of them is called the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, a pro-Communist spin-off of the party that ruled China before Mao Zedong took over and which then fled to Taiwan. At first, Mao kept these groups alive as a way to win over people who were not hard-core Communists yet who sympathised with Mao’s goals. But he lost patience with them during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of their members were jailed. Deng Xiaoping revived the parties in the 1980s to show that China was becoming more tolerant again.

As Mr Luo is doubtless aware, that tolerance is extremely limited. A Communist Party website says the eight parties are “neither parties out of office nor opposition parties”, and all of them support the Communists. They are funded by the Communist Party and do not contest any elections. New members must be recommended by existing ones and there is no open recruitment. In some cases they also belong to the Communist Party. They often speak with even greater caution than Communists, says a member of the Peasants and Workers Democratic Party, because they know their groups exist only with the Communist Party’s assent.

It was not until 2007 that people from non-Communist parties were chosen to serve as ministers—one was put in charge of health, another science and technology. Loyal to the Communists though the non-Communists are, they are only trusted with jobs that do not have a direct bearing on the Communists’ grip on power.

Mr Luo is one of many people from the eight parties who are rewarded for their subservience with memberships of advisory bodies (just as much flower vases as the parties themselves, many Chinese grumble). He is a vice-chairman of the most prestigious of these, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which is holding its annual meeting to make polite suggestions to the rubber-stamp parliament (see article). On March 5th he attended a meeting of around 45 fellow party members who are delegates to the CPPCC. They sat around a square table declaring “great satisfaction” with the Communist Party’s achievements—albeit without obvious enthusiasm. Many of them tapped away on their phones; one read a newspaper.

Mr Luo drank tea and remained silent. He had reason to be subdued. Censors had begun their work online, deleting much of the discussion of his party’s proposal.