Fewer cadres, more migrant rural workers in legislatures

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-01-16 21:36

China is continuing with the effort of reducing the number of officials and incorporating more ordinary citizens in its legislatures, to make them more representative of the public.

Among the 770 newly-selected deputies to People's Congress of Beijing Municipality, only 62, or 8 percent, are from government departments, compared with 100 five years ago, People's Daily reported.

Among Shanghai's 860 deputies, the number of officials of, or higher than, prefecture level were 49 less than that of five years ago, the paper said, without giving exact figures.

It has also become a general trend in other provincial-level legislature elections to cut the number of officials, it added.

"To cut the number of officials in legislatures provides a bigger access for grassroots deputies, a move that makes legislators more representative of the general public," the paper quoted Han Dayuan, a law professor with Renmin University, as saying.

In Beijing, the number of worker deputies increased to 28 from 10 five years ago and the number of farmer deputies also rose from 13 to 21. In central Henan Province, these grassroots deputies accounted for 36 percent of the total.

In particular, China's hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers are having more of their own representatives seated in the provincial legislatures.

The cities of Beijing and Shanghai and Fujian Province saw in January for the first time the election of migrant workers as local legislators, the paper said.

The election of migrant workers as local lawmakers began in 2002 in  Zhejiang Province, when Zhu Linfei was the first migrant worker to be elected as a deputy in Yiwu City People's Congress.

In last year's annual session of the National People's Congress, a bill was passed to stipulate that provinces and municipalities with large populations of rural migrant workers should set deputy quotas for the disadvantaged group.



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