Rulers in Beijing in the late 1970s drew up a design to transform local congresses from institutions that mechanically stood in for the Chinese mass public, with merely demographically descriptive and politically symbolic representation, to substantively representative institutions. Certainly, in qualitative interviews, congress delegates and Chinese congress scholars widely suggest a notion of congressional representation along these lines has taken hold of the rhetoric of representation. Following are illustrative quotes from a congress scholar and a township congress chair, respectively.

In this chapter, I take up this question of substantive congressional representation. In the understanding and actions of already elected congress delegates, how and how much have ordinary Chinese been transformed into constituents?

To be sure, the implications for congress composition of the selectoral connection studied in Chapter 2 are at the same time implications for substantive congressional representation. Yet many township and county congress delegates are party (not voter) nominees. Moreover, there is no mechanism to seat voter nominees in the indirectly elected congresses at and above the municipality. More to the point, for ordinary Chinese, even supposing that the “good types” described in Chapter 2 are in principle good bets for substantive congressional representation, what elected delegates actually do is an entirely different empirical question from the one studied in that chapter.