A “new social class” or old friends? A study of private entrepreneurs in the national people's congress of china

In this research note, we introduce a new dataset on China's national legislators. It provides descriptive information on one key parameter: the nature of the business owned by private entrepreneur deputies in China's National People's Congress (NPC) from 2003 to 2017. The dataset contains information on whether the deputy once worked as a government official, whether the deputy was a former top manager of a state-owned/collective enterprise, and whether his/her current company was a state-owned/collective enterprise before being privatized. We categorize deputies as “insiders” as long as they stratify one of the aforementioned backgrounds, whereas others as the “grassroots.” This dataset thus reveals two types of private entrepreneur deputies who are significantly different with regard to how they started their own businesses. These findings shed new light on the relationship between private entrepreneurs and the party-state in China.