China’s adoption of a gender quota in politics can be traced back to 1933 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Controlled Border Region introduced a 25 percent gender quota in the parliament. Yet, with a few exceptions,  the adoption and enforcement of gender quota and women’s representation in China’s legislature remain understudied. Where is the Half Sky draws on in-depth interviews and two original datasets on local elections from several field trips in two groups of most socioeconomically similar counties which produced contrasting election results on women’s proportion in the 2016 election. The findings offer a rich description of the CCP-controlled election process and a novel theory on women's representation in local China. Women’s access to the Congress is determined by the CCP’s enforcement of grassroots rather than gender quota, conditioned on the CCP’s adoption of a higher grassroots quota threshold as opposed to including political and social elites. Once elected, women perform  substantive representation not through formal congressional sessions but informal channels outside of the Congress, forming a pattern of “representation without legislation.” The findings of the book reveal how the imposition of a multi-quota system and the practice of extra-legislative politics shape women's descriptive and substantive representation under China’s one-party political system.

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