China Voice: Balancing representation at the Great Hall of the People

In the same room that Pony Ma, chief executive of Tencent Holdings, proposes wider application of mobile Internet technology, Xue Haiying, a sanitation worker from Tianjin Municipality, is pushing for better housing and medicare for her colleagues.

Ma and Xue joined more than 2,900 other deputies at the National People's Congress, China's top legislature, in the Great Hall of the People to deliberate on the government work report. They are expected to vote on its adoption before the annual session concludes on March 15.

If, as the New York Times lamented in a recent report, billionaires like Ma "ensure the rich are represented in China's legislature", deputies like Xue, who earns around 200 US dollars a month cleaning the streets, ensure laborers "access to the highest echelons of the party and the government".

China's legislature is not without room to improve its composition, but it has been making big strides in recent years. Farmers and factory workers made up 13.42 percent of deputies to the 12th NPC, a 5.18-percent rise from the 11th NPC.

In 2010, China amended its Electoral Law to ensure both rural and urban areas adopt the same ratio of deputies, ending a practice where each rural deputy represented a population four times that of an urban deputy.

Just as eradicating the urban-rural gap in NPC representation, China has committed to narrow the obvious gap between rich and poor by increasing minimum wages, promoting medical insurance and providing affordable housing - priorities that would greatly benefit deputies like Xue.

It is important to remember there is a process for improvement, especially for a country with 1.37 billion people.

Good entrepreneurs, who would be called job creators by some, should not be excluded from the process just because of the profits they reap.

During China's legislature, Xue is an equally commendable representative of China's honest, industrious laborers as Ma, the founder of the world's second largest Internet company, whose business revolutionized the way Chinese people interact with one another.

Just as every other challenge posed to China in its path forward requires a difficult balance, the same can be said about balancing representation at the National People's Congress.

Air quality improvement, a hugely popular issue for this NPC session, is a prime example. To address the smog engulfing Beijing and other major cities, heavy industries have to be shut down in places like Hebei Province, where residents would lose jobs that are unlikely be replaced by a new industry for a long time.

Therefore it's very important -- and delicate -- for China to reconcile everything, from environmental protection to industrial development, from Ma's mobile Internet to Xue's social security.

It is the real challenge. Endite