THE ANNUAL sitting of the National People's Congress, China's well-fed eunuch of a parliament, poses several tests for foreign reporters. Though its committees may suggest tweaks to new laws, and some play a diplomatic role engaging with foreign legislators, meetings of its 3,000 or so delegates are mostly very dull. Indeed, the congress has never voted down a proposal from Communist Party chiefs. There is the puzzle of whether to join a yearly propaganda show in which foreign journalists are given plum seats at leaders' press conferences and urged to pre-submit questions that few will be invited to ask-allowing state media to show domestic audiences the world's press, hands aloft and clamouring to join this simulacrum of representative democracy.
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