Authors: Damien Ma and Neil Thomas, MacroPolo

March Madness for China watchers is the ‘Two Sessions’: the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Yet, from scripted press conferences to rubber stamp approvals, these institutions are often dismissed as political pageantry of little significance. Recent scholarship suggests otherwise.

Rory Truex, political scientist from Princeton, argues that the rote proceedings and staged appearance of the Two Sessions belie the real political significance of the NPC, formally the highest organ of state authority in China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rewards NPC delegates who, throughout the year, make suggestions that transmit citizen preferences on non-sensitive political issues, such as environmental protection, to central policymakers.

The NPC serves as an information feedback mechanism for the CCP to better ‘serve the people’, placate anti-government sentiment at the grassroots and address grievances from constituencies. It achieves what Truex calls ‘representation within bounds’.

But who does the NPC actually represent? Who are the 2975 NPC delegates who descended on Beijing this March? How do their demographic characteristics compare with the 375 policymakers who comprise the CCP’s all-powerful Central Committee (CC)? Do ethnicity, gender, age and place of ancestry correlate with how far one can go in Chinese politics?

The CC and the NPC have quotas ensuring some equality in the representation of officials who work in different provinces. But many senior officials are not from the provinces in which they work, so officials’ geographic backgrounds are not necessarily equally represented.

For every CC and NPC member, the government publicises their ‘place of ancestry’ — jiguan — which regulations define as ‘the long-term residence of one’s paternal grandfather’. Some jiguan are significantly overrepresented or underrepresented in both institutions.

CC members with paternal ancestors from the wealthy provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong and Beijing are overrepresented by at least 50 per cent relative to their populations. Shandong, China’s second-most populous province, enjoys jiguan representation almost double its relative population size. Shaanxi, the provincial jiguan of President Xi Jinping, is overrepresented by 25 per cent.

NPC representation is on average somewhat more equitable than the CC. But some patterns are reversed in the NPC: politicians with ancestry in Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin are significantly underrepresented compared to the CC and there is much better representation of those from Anhui, Shanxi and Sichuan provinces.

Each of China’s 55 officially recognised ethnic minorities, together constituting 8.5 per cent of the national population, have at least one NPC representative. Even three ethnicities with fewer than 5000 people — the Tatars, Lhoba and Gaoshan — each have an NPC delegate. But in the CC, 38 of the 55 minorities have no representation, including 8.4 million Tujia people. Even some of the 18 ethnicities with CC members remain underrepresented relative to their size, such as the Miao, Manchu, Yi and Zhuang peoples — whose numbers range from 8.7 million to 16.9 million.

Western Chinese minorities such as Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols and Hui, are actually overrepresented in the CC. But such appointments are probably intended to co-opt local elites, as those regions’ allegiances to Beijing are a perennial CCP preoccupation. That Han Chinese make up 85.3 per cent of NPC delegates despite forming 91.5 per cent of the national population means almost every minority is overrepresented on the NPC.

Gender is a different story. It is well known that Chinese female politicians tend to hit a glass ceiling and are significantly underrepresented in the CC. The CC is only 8 per cent female, with women comprising less than 5 per cent of full members. In the NPC, female membership is almost 25 per cent, still well short of equality but three times better than the CC. Female representation in the NPC actually narrowly beats the global average for women in parliament and does just better than the US Congress.

Chinese politics is also ageist, in the sense that experience and seniority are often prerequisites for advancement. The average age of all CC members is 58.8 — it’s 59 for US congressional representatives — while for full CC members it is 61.2. NPC delegates are 53.8 on average, in line with the global average age for parliamentarians of 53. Still, the median age in China is 37, so young Chinese are significantly underrepresented, a phenomenon common around the world.

What do these data tell us? The NPC is younger, more female and far more ethnically diverse than the CC — although both fall short of equal representation for women and young people. It seems nearly impossible for ethnic minorities and women to reach the uppermost rung of Chinese politics.

The greater demographic diversity found in the NPC seems to support Truex’s theory that it is an institution that the CCP uses, in the absence of free elections and widespread polling, to collect valuable information about its performance from a wide cross-section of society.

Perhaps a more fundamental finding is that there may be significant inequality of political opportunity for Chinese whose ancestors come from different parts of China. Proportionately far more NPC and CC members trace their lineage to the wealthy east coast than to the poorer southern provinces. So, the person you are most likely to see in the halls of Chinese political power is a fifty-something Han Chinese man who considers himself an east-coaster.

Damien Ma is the Co-Founder and Director of MacroPolo, the Think Tank of the Paulson Institute in Chicago. He is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @damienics

Neil Thomas is a Research Associate at MacroPolo. You can follow him on Twitter @neilthomas123

A more detailed version of this article originally appeared here at MacroPolo. Data for CC members comes from The Committee, MacroPolo’s digital interactive on Chinese elite politics.