China’s lawmakers have never been well-known for bucking the will of their Communist Party bosses. But Shen Jilan, who died on Saturday from liver cancer at the age of 90, took her duties as a rubber-stamp of the people to the extreme during a record-setting 66-year stint as a delegate to the National People’s Congress in which she never once voted no.

Born in 1929, the Shanxi Province native was appointed to China’s top-lawmaking body in 1954, meeting CCP legends including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Jiang Zemin – who termed her a “national treasure.” Others, less kindly, nicknamed her the “living fossil” as the only person to hold onto a seat in the NPC through more than six decades of bloody purges and social and economic upheaval.

Shen famously set out her views on the correct duties of a national lawmaker in 2010: follow the party’s instructions, and never vote to oppose any legislation. Her contributions to the NPC’s legislative agenda included a motion to ban the use of television remote controls to force everyone to watch state-mouthpiece CCTV. She also proposed citizens should be vetted before being allowed to access China’s heavily censored internet, and urged the government to ban the term “corrupt official” – to show the CCP was great and righteous – and replace it with “people who illegally smuggled themselves into the party.”

When Shen was reelected in 2013, a post appeared on the Weibo account of Shanxi Province’s CCP youth committee saying that since she had never voted to oppose anything the party proposed and she represented nobody. The criticism was quickly deleted and the committee said it had been posted due to a “manual error.”

Shen was rewarded for her long years of service to the Chinese people with a number of awards, garnering China’s highest honor, the Medal of the Republic, in 2019.

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