Abstract
Local people’s congresses have become increasingly active, carrying out legislative activities and (supposedly) supervising state organizations. Based on the analysis of bills submitted to Yangzhou Municipal People’s Congresses, we find that congress delegates have increasingly represented the interests and demands of the geographic areas from which they are elected, and that the local people’s congress has become a place to present and coordinate various competing interests, which are often contradictory to the interests of the local Party committee that represents the higher authority of the state. In other words, the local people’s congress has become a place where two interests intersect: the “central” interests represented by the local Party committee and the “local” interests represented by the local people’s congress delegates.
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Notes
The data come from the Yangzhou MPC website: http://www.yzrd.gov.cn/index.asp.
In this sense, the interview method used in this article is different from the structured interview methods that follow the same questionnaire in every interview [5]. Instead the interviews used here are similar to those conducted by Hurst [6, 9], which “allowed interviewees to discuss issues and ideas that concerned them.”
A trade union is a CCP-sponsored labor union in China.
The revenue of the Jiangsu Sanxiao Group is far higher than the revenue of the Hangjiang District government, which was 628 million yuan in 2003. The data are from the 2003 Yangzhou official statistics: http://www.yzstats.gov.cn/gzsc/2003.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Yuen Yuen Ang, Kevin O'Brien, and Vivian Zhan for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this analysis was presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, Toronto, Canada, March 2012.
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Kamo, T., Takeuchi, H. Representation and Local People’s Congresses in China: A Case Study of the Yangzhou Municipal People’s Congress. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 18, 41–60 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-012-9226-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-012-9226-y