For citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the constitutional right to stand for election promises representation. In practice, attempts to exercise this right can bring surveillance, harassment, detention, and exclusion from the ballot.
People walk past the Great Hall of the People, which houses the National People’s Congress in the capital city of Beijing, Oct. 19, 2024. The NPC, though named as though it serves the interest of the Chinese people, has been criticized for actually being a proxy of the Chinese Communist Party. (Photo: Shutterstock / Anyawhy)
But represented by whom, chosen how, accountable to what? Voice of America has reported former deputies describing the institution bluntly as a rubber stamp, with one summarizing: “Our election is fake.” NPC speaker Lou Qinjian confirmed the priority at the 2024 session, stating that the NPC must be “a political organ that consciously adheres to the leadership of the CCP.” In game-designer terms: the NPC’s script is written by the Chinese Communist Party. The people provide the name. The Party writes the lines.
Article 2 of China’s Constitution declares that “all power in the People’s Republic of China belongs to the people” and that the people exercise state power through the NPC and local people’s congresses. Article 34 guarantees that citizens over 18 have the right to vote and to stand for election. The Electoral Law provides that candidates may be nominated by parties, social organizations, or – crucially – by 10 or more voters in the same constituency. Self-nomination is not merely tolerated; it is written into the law.
Read alongside Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights (ICCPR), which guarantees every citizen the right “to vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections” without unreasonable restriction, these provisions describe a functioning electoral framework. A citizen who meets the basic criteria, secures 10 nominations, and lawfully campaigns among voters should, on the face of the text, be able to stand, be heard, and – if voters so choose – win.
China signed the ICCPR on Oct. 5, 1998 but has never ratified it. By 2013, Human Rights Watch had already noted that China was the only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council not to have ratified the treaty, a distinction it retains. In its 2023 submission to the U.N. Universal Periodic Review, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) urged Beijing yet again to ratify the ICCPR, noting that China had repeatedly “accepted” recommendations to “continue working toward” ratification without ever completing the step.
Independent runs
The constitutional right to stand for election, the ICCPR’s guarantee of genuine elections, and China’s stated commitment to human rights thus form a trinity of promises. Each is intact on paper, but none is enforceable in court. The people’s name is everywhere. The people’s power is not.
There have been people who found this out the hard way. They attempted to exercise the one concrete power the Constitution most explicitly places in their hands – the right to stand for election – only to have the system reveal itself not as a system that fails to live up to its name, but one so carefully constructed that the name can never be challenged from within.
In 1998, Yao Lifa — a schoolteacher from Qianjiang, Hubei –became the first person in the PRC to win a seat on a local people’s congress through genuine self-nomination, without Party backing. He had been trying since 1988. Once elected, he submitted 187 of the 459 suggestions, opinions, and criticisms raised in the Qianjiang congress over five years, using the institution as a genuine deliberative platform.
By the 2006 cycle, the response had hardened. Authorities detained Yao and other independent candidates after they met to discuss campaigns; unidentified assailants beat Yao, then 48, multiple times. On Nov. 7, 2006 — the eve of the vote — public security officials summoned him as he was heading out to canvass. His son told the South China Morning Post: “They were trying to isolate my father from the voters.” The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) concluded that these actions violated Article 34 of the PRC Constitution and Article 25 of the ICCPR. In the 2016 cycle, on the very day Yao announced his candidacy with 57 others, authorities forced Yao into a vehicle and drove him out of Hubei for several days.
In Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan, the 2011 elections had hundreds of citizens coordinating independent candidacies through social media. The Party-run Global Times warned, however, that “independent candidates could destroy the current system by soliciting votes on the Internet.” The threat was not violence. It was the possibility that elections might function as elections.
The illusion
of power
Despite being the world’s largest parliament, China’s National People’s Congress operates as a non-salaried, part-time body that meets for just two weeks a year to rubber-stamp Chinese Communist Party directives.
Legally subordinate to a single party
The PRC Constitution explicitly enshrines the “leading role” of the CCP over all state organs, making the NPC legally subordinate to party directives. The general secretary of the CCP also holds greater power over the NPC chair.
Extreme scale versus actual work done
It is the largest legislative body in the world with over 2,900 delegates. However, the full body meets for only 10 to 14 days per year (every March in Beijing). Because nearly 3,000 delegates cannot meet regularly, real legislative authority is handed to the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), a body of roughly 175 members that meets every two months to enact laws, interpret statutes, and oversee executive organs.
Party control of candidate lists
Candidates at all levels are heavily screened by local CCP election committees or organizational departments. Independent candidates who attempt to run without Party backing are routinely blocked, harassed, or disqualified.
Not full-time work
The vast majority of NPC delegates are non-salaried, part-time representatives who maintain their regular careers.
Lack of institutional accountability
There is no such thing as checks and balances for this parliament. The NPC has never rejected a central government report, a state budget, or a judicial appointment proposed by the ruling party.
Radio Free Asia documented Beijing authorities sending candidates “on vacation” before polling day. China Change reported that all 13 Beijing independents in 2011 were harassed, summoned, or abducted after declaring their candidacies; only one reached the primary, and she was coerced into dropping out after her phone was taken and she was interrogated through the night. The Los Angeles Times described another candidate held in a police basement for 10 hours after printing fliers. Officers told her: “It’s illegal to publicize your campaign. You have to do it our way.”
By the 2021 cycle, 14 independents withdrew, with 10 put under strict surveillance from the moment they declared their intention to run for office. The NPC claims to speak for the people – while citizens are denied the space to speak for themselves.
Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the opening of the Second Session of the 14th National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 5, 2024, where Premier Li Qiang delivered his maiden Government Work Report. (Photo: Shutterstock / XC2000)
Scholars speak
The academic literature on people’s congress elections converges on a finding that directly illuminates what happens to independent candidates: The system was never designed to convert citizen preferences into political power. It was designed to convert political power into the appearance of citizen consent — to give Party decisions the name and form of popular representation without the substance.
Political scientist Kevin O’Brien, studying how deputies understood their roles, found they did not see themselves as independent representatives, but as participants in a state-building project. According to the University of California at Berkeley professor, they “did not think they had to choose between representing the state and representing their constituents.” The independent candidates like Yao Lifa and the hundreds across Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan were the exceptions that proved the rule. They thought the two roles might point in different directions. The system’s response was not a malfunction. It was the correction of an anomaly.
Melanie Manion, in Information for Autocrats, distinguishes between “good types” – candidates nominated by ordinary voters — and “governing types” — Party-nominated candidates reflecting valued competence and loyalty. Even when “good types” make it in, she finds, representation in local congresses “taps local knowledge for local governance, thereby bolstering the rule of autocrats in Beijing.” Independent candidates are “an unintended consequence of the election system,” and “local authorities suppress them with silent approval from Beijing.”
Peking University’s Jiang Shigong, writing as a constitutional theorist sympathetic to the Party, states that the NPC is indeed a rubber stamp – not as criticism, but as a description of its proper function. The NPC’s role is to translate Party policy into law, not to contest it. As Heidelberg scholars note: Jiang’s framework places Party leadership beyond constitutional challenge, making it the “absolute constitution” behind China’s regime. If Party leadership is the constitutional order, then any citizen who contests that leadership from within the electoral system is not exercising a constitutional right but threatening the constitutional order. The people’s congress does not protect them. It is, in the state’s account, precisely what they are attacking.
Taken together, the scholarship and the cases of Yao Lifa and other independent candidates point to a consistent logic. The right to stand for election exists in law. It is not formally abolished. What has been created instead is a system — informal, extralegal, consistent across decades and provinces — ensuring that the political content of people’s congresses is determined by the Party before any voter casts a ballot. As Manion’s research confirms, this is representation in the service of autocrats, functioning as designed. The people’s congress bears the people’s name so that the Party’s power can bear the people’s legitimacy.
Those who concluded that genuine electoral participation was impossible sometimes chose another path: not the ballot box, but the street; not candidacies, but petitions; not the mechanics of the Electoral Law, but the language of the Constitution itself, deployed in public squares and open letters. They called themselves citizens, invoked their constitutional rights, and asked the state to honor the commitments written into its own foundational document.
What they discovered was this: constitutional advocacy itself had become a crime.
