Since its founding in 1954, the National People's Congress of China (NPC) has followed a difficult course of development, a course which has been characterized by periods of limited progress intermingled with periods of stagnation and regression. Political campaigns from the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957-1958) to the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) frustrated the establishment of any consistent policy concerning the appropriate role of the legislature within the one-party, Maoist regime. Mao's death in 1976, however, ushered in a new era of political...

How can the poor and weak 'work' a political system to their advantage� Drawing mainly on interviews and surveys in rural China, Kevin O'Brien and Lianjiang Li show that popular action often hinges on locating and exploiting divisions within the state. Otherwise powerless people use the rhetoric and commitments of the central government to try to fight misconduct by local officials, open up clogged channels of participation, and push back the frontiers of the permissible. This 'rightful resistance' has far-reaching implications for our understanding of contentious politics. As O'Brien...

This detailed study of the NPC examines how it has changed from its founding under Mao through the regime of Deng Xiaoping.