Representation without democratization: The “signature incident” and China's National People's Congress

This essay provides an analysis of China's National People's Congress (NPC) as a key institution in China's transition from an authoritarian regime to a pluralist political system. Using the revealing incident of Hu Jiwei's attempt to force a meeting of the NPC Standing Committee as a model of possible future interaction between the NPC and the CCP, the author hypothesizes that the NPC may serve as a major site for bringing about significant political change. It provides a new perspective on the NPC by adopting an institutional‐functional approach. Specially, the author tries to explain the function and strength of the legislature as an implanted Western institution in China's context by looking into how its essentially democratic core‐representation, which, to simplify gross, was dismissed by previous researchers as only existed in “sociological” terms, survived through adapting into Chinese own tradition and political infrastructure.