The Supreme Court's report received 2,172 affirmative votes, 519 dissenting votes and 192 abstentions at the 2009 NPC. Most of the nay sayers were deputies from legal and business circles who have the first-hand experience of legal unfairness or bureaucracy. But not everyone of them would say publicly of their choices like Mr. Liang.

The option to cast a vote of dissent was provided for the first NPC in 1954. But no deputy publicly exercised it until 1988. At the election of members of the Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Committee of the seventh NPC, Huang Shunxing, a deputy representing Taiwan, articulated "I disagree" from his microphone, and was immediately rewarded with loud applause in the hall. He disputed that a candidate for the committee's chair was in the position to do the job at the age of 89, and suggested replacing him with younger talent.

At the same session Mr. Huang voiced his discontent with the closeness of deputy seating, which he argued enabled deputies to peep at each other's ballots without much effort. He proposed and won a set up for secret ballots. These episodes at the 1988 NPC were deemed by some scholars "landmarks in Chinese politics and democracy."

An electronic voting system debuted at the third session of the seventh NPC in 1990, a revolution in the legislative methodology which had seen deputies casting ballots by way of handclap, raised hands, or crossing off a yes or no on a slip of paper. The introduction of this system led to a steady climb in dissenting votes and abstentions. On the vote for the work report by the Supreme People's Procuratorate at the fifth session of the eighth NPC in 1997, combined dissenters and abstentees reached a peak of 1,099, or 40.4 percent of all votes.

Vote-buying: A Vice of Democracy

Earlier this year the media exposed a scandal: the trade of votes for money. The two persons involved are He Bangxi, president of Xima Group, and Xu Dingfeng, board chair of the Siait Cables Group Co., Ltd., both natives of Anhui Province. They bribed their way first into the provincial People's Congress, and then to the NPC. The incident rang the alarm once more against under-the-table deals in elections at local and national levels.

Coveting the honor and influence that comes with a seat in the people's congresses, some officials (or the simply wealthy) approach electorates or incumbent deputies with various kinds of bait, ranging across cash, gift cards, free trips, or promises of preferential policies or promotions once in office. Some cheeky ones just set a price for each vote cast in their favor.

When Linfen, Shanxi Province, was promoted from a prefecture to a city in 2000, the election of its first Municipal People's Congress was celebrated by local people as an event of historic significance. But only eight days after the results were revealed, the news broke that five of the newly elected, all private entrepreneurs, were expelled from the contest for being found guilty of winning their nominations by offering sitting deputies dinners and gift cards.

Wang Yukai, a professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance, summarizes, "Vote-buying mostly occurred at the grassroot level in the past, mostly in towns and counties, but is now making its way up the chain. This is a sign that previous efforts to keep vice under control were inadequate from the very beginning. On the other hand, problems with elections nevertheless indicate the importance of elections in our system; it all attests to the fact that elections, not appointments, are deciding who the nation's law-makers will be."