Author(s) Luwei Rose Luqiu and Chuyu Liu Keywords China, National People’s Congress, private entrepreneur, co-optation, corruption Abstract 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. Author(s) Bio Luwei Rose Luqiu is a PhD candidate at the College of Communications of Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania. Her research interests involve 398 Luwei Rose Luqiu and Chuyu Liu censorship, propaganda, and social movement in authoritarian regimes. She has been a journalist for 20 years and was a 2007 Nieman fellow at Harvard University. She obtained her master’s degree in mass communication from Hong Kong Baptist University. She earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Fudan University. Chuyu Liu is a PhD candidate in political science at Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania. He studies ethnic conflicts in authoritarian states, with a regional focus on China. His recent research examines the relationship between local governments’ fiscal behaviors and subnational ethnic violence. He received his BA from Fudan University and MA from Pennsylvania State University. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/jea.2018.18