Barely a week into March, nearly 3,000 delegates gathered at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for the opening of the Fourteenth National People’s Congress and, separately the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Though the National People’s Congress is, according to China’s constitution, the highest legislative organ in the land, it is actually the Chinese Communist Party’s views that determine policy. Official sources bridle at foreign press descriptions of the National People’s Congress as a rubber stamp parliament, insisting that the body simply represents the will of the Chinese people, who are the ultimate decision-makers. While the government cherry-picks certain statistics to bolster the democratic credentials of the National People’s Congress (e.g., ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the congress relative to the overall population and each of the country’s fifty-five nationalities are represented), it ignores others that undermine its case (e.g., women only account for 25 percent of congress delegates, and farmers and front-line workers represented a mere 16 percent of delegates).
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