It is long argued that some people look more like leaders than others. But it is not systematically examined, nor is it clear whether such facial cues matter in real politics. We collected more than five thousand photos of local political consultative legislature members in China and then matched them into anonymous pairs that consisted of a politician and a nonpolitician, controlling for location, age, gender, smile, glass-wearing, etc. By doing several online survey experiments, we discover that: i) Chinese respondents are able to tell politicians from nonpoliticians by just looking at photo pairs. ii) Respondents trust and vote for politicians more than nonpoliticians. iii) Politicians are more likely to deter respondents from rebellious collective action or to induce them to accept an unfavorable offer. Further analyses demonstrate that our findings are stronger for local politicians with more detectable cues for politicians; such local politicians look more like senior Chinese leaders from the ruling communist party’s central committee. Our findings are robust to whether we use manually selected photo pairs or pairs that are selected with the help of AI-based image analysis techniques. Our research demonstrates that leader-like facial cues exist and matter in real politics.