On Friday, May 6, the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) released its legislative plan for 2022 (Plan). The Plan was preliminarily approved in November 2021 and finalized by the Council of Chairpersons on April 11. It lists bills that are scheduled for review or research this year, and also sets forth priorities for all aspects of the NPCSC’s legislative work in 2022. As usual, we will focus on the legislative projects listed in the Plan below.
By @tango2010 on Weibo. Original post since censored. Archived copy courtesy of @NiaoCollective on Twitter.
Shanghai’s lockdown to eradicate a local Covid-19 outbreak continues. Over the past weekend, Shanghai residents in multiple districts discovered that green metal fences were erected outside their residential compounds or buildings. In a widely circulated notice by the Pudong New Area government, that move was termed “hard isolation” [硬隔离]. Exasperated by the latest development, many residents dug up a set of Q&A-style statements issued by the Legislative Affairs Commission (LAC) of the NPC Standing Committee in March 2020 and relied on them to argue that Shanghai’s “hard isolation” measures were unlawful. But do the LAC statements in fact support the residents’ argument?
The NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) concluded its session this month on April 20, 2022. It adopted the Futures and Derivatives Law [期货和衍生品法], which will introduce “a comprehensive legal framework for the operation of futures and over-the-counter derivatives markets in China.” The NPCSC also comprehensively revised the Vocational Education Law [职业教育法], the statute’s first update since its enactment in 1996, with the policy goal of cultivating “high-quality technical and skilled personnel” and “providing powerful talent and skill support” for socialist modernization. Due to our lack of expertise on these subjects, however, we are unable to offer more in-depth summaries or analyses of these two laws.
English translations will be provided if and when available. All explanatory documents are in Chinese.
To submit comments online, please refer to this guide. Comments can also be mailed to the NPCSC Legislative Affairs Commission [全国人大常委会法制工作委员会] at the following address:
The Council of Chairpersons decided on Monday, April 11 to convene the 34th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) from April 18 to 20. Five legislative bills are on the tentative agenda, along with three documents relating to the elections of delegates to the next NPC. As usual, a quick rundown on the agenda follows.
The 13th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) is expected to convene for its 34th session in late April. The Council of Chairpersons is expected to meet in mid-April to decide on the agenda and dates of the session. The session is expected to review the following bills:
Delegates voting by a show of hands at the inaugural session of the First NPC in 1954.
China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is the largest legislature in the world. Since 1986, its size has been capped by the Election Law for the National People’s Congress and Local People’s Congresses at All Levels (Election Law) [全国人民代表大会和地方各级人民代表大会选举法] at 3,000. The delegates are indirectly elected every five years to represent thirty-five electoral units: the thirty-one provincial administrative regions in mainland China, the Chinese military, as well as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.
Under the Election Law, NPC delegates must be “broadly representative” [广泛的代表性]. To that end, the Law requires in general terms that various demographic groups, including women and ethnic minorities, have “appropriate” representation in the NPC. Since the Reform Era (1978–), each NPC has, at its last session, adopted a “decision on the quotas and elections” of delegates to the next NPC—referred to below as a “Master Allocation Plan” or “Master Plan”—that puts the Election Law’s general requirements in more concrete terms. (The Master Plan for the 14th NPC was recently adopted on March 11.) The Plans have either allocated a specific number of seats to a certain demographic group or set forth guidelines on a group’s representation in the next NPC.
Below, we first explain how seats in the NPC have been allocated among the various electoral units and demographic groups to achieve a demographically diverse membership, before briefly taking a look at the non-demographic criteria for selecting NPC delegates.
The 5th Session of the 13th NPC concluded on Friday, March 11, after having approved all reports and bills submitted to it for consideration. As usual, below we have compiled a list of all official documents from this Session. Unless otherwise noted, all documents are available in Chinese only. The NPC’s votes on bills and resolutions are also listed below in brackets, in the order of yea – nay – abstention, followed by the number of delegates not voting (NV).
The NPC concluded its annual session in 2022 on Friday, March 11. Among other actions taken, it approved four pieces of legislation: the first set of major amendments to the Organic Law of Local People’s Congresses at All Levels and Local People’s Governments at All Levels (“Local Organic Law”) [地方各级人民代表大会和地方各级人民政府组织法] in over two decades; a decision governing the elections of delegates to the next (14th) NPC; and two measures for electing 14th NPC delegates from Hong Kong and Macao, respectively. We will cover the decision on 14th NPC elections in a forthcoming post that looks at how seats in the NPC are allocated to various electoral units and demographic groups. Below, we briefly summarize the other three pieces of legislation.
