China Focus: Deputies to 14th NPC broadly representative

BEIJING  -- The deputies to the 14th National People's Congress (NPC), China's national legislature, make up a broad cross-section of people, with every region, ethnic group and sector of society having an appropriate number of representatives.

On Friday, the NPC Standing Committee confirmed the validity of the qualifications of the 2,977 NPC deputies and published the list of names.

Among the 14th NPC deputies, 442 are from ethnic minorities, representing all of China's 55 ethnic minority groups.

The new lineup includes 790 female deputies, accounting for 26.54 percent of the total, up 1.64 percentage points from the 13th NPC.

A total of 497 deputies are workers and farmers. Their share has grown by nearly one percentage point to 16.69 percent of the total deputies.

Technical personnel, altogether 634 in number, make up 21.3 percent of all deputies, with a 0.73-percentage-point increase from the previous NPC.

A total of 969 deputies are Party and government officials, whose share has dropped by 1.38 percentage points to 32.55 percent.

There are also 36 deputies elected from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) and 12 from the Macao SAR. Thirteen deputies representing Taiwan Province will sit on the national legislature. Forty-two deputies represent those overseas Chinese who have returned to the motherland.

Altogether, 797 deputies were re-elected, accounting for 26.77 percent of the total.

The 2,977 deputies to the 14th NPC were elected from 35 electoral units across the country between December 2022 and January 2023, according to a report on the election of the deputies.

All the new-term deputies support the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the report said.

They set a good example by abiding by the Constitution and the law, maintain close contact with the people, and win extensive recognition from the people, it noted.

The successful election of the 14th NPC deputies laid a solid organizational foundation for the new NPC to perform its duty in accordance with the law. The election is of great significance to developing whole-process people's democracy, upholding and improving the system of people's congresses, and modernizing China's system and capacity for governance.