2020 in Review: A Norm-Breaking Year at the NPC

How best to describe 2020? Challenging. Surreal. Exhausting. And for China’s national legislature, norm-breaking. On this last day of the year, we look back, as usual, at the National People’s Congress’s and our work in 2020. To start, we recount those NPC institutional norms that were burned by the dumpster fire that was 2020.

The Norms Broken

COVID-19 derailed the legislature’s plan for 2020 early on, before the outbreak had reached pandemic level. The NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) had to allow a few dozen legislators to attend its February and April sessions via videoconference for the first time in history. The pandemic also forced the NPCSC to postpone the NPC’s annual session, originally scheduled for early March, till late May. The session was also shortened to only seven days, from typically ten days or so. As a result, the NPC’s 2020 annual session was both the latest and the shortest in at least three decades.

What was truly unprecedented about that session was, of course, its decision authorizing the NPCSC to enact national security legislation for Hong Kong. The decision upended the prevailing view that the central government had no legal authority to legislate on national security matters for Hong Kong—much less directly apply such a national law to the city without involving its own legislature. The NPCSC then acted swiftly and adopted the Hong Kong National Security Law on June 30. It did so by meeting twice in a single month and without conducting any public consultation: two exceedingly rare steps that, again, deviated from established practice. In November, the NPCSC relied again on the NPC’s May decision to prescribe additional qualifications for members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo), resulting in the immediate disqualification of four pro-democracy legislators. In the interim, the NPCSC also extended the incumbent LegCo’s term for a year, but without any apparent authority to do so.

Finally, the NPCSC’s transparency in 2020 suffered a serious blow. It held nine sessions this year—a record high in recent memory. But for none of the multiday sessions did it release a complete agenda and daily schedule at the start of the session, contrary to its usual practice. The public thus could only rely on news reports citing anonymous resources—which are oftentimes vague and not always accurate—to get a sense of what was going on inside the Great Hall of the People. In 2020, the NPCSC also stopped holding post-session press conferences, at which it used to invite senior legislators and government officials to discuss important new bills. Even the pandemic is not a good excuse for canceling the press conferences after the virus had been largely under control in China. And there was certainly no shortage of important bills to discuss, whether Hong Kong-related or not. We can only hope that transparency norms will be restored in the new year, especially as the NPCSC plans to consider revisions to its own rules of procedure.

The NPC in 2020

2020 was the legislature’s most productive year since 2013. This past year, the NPCSC was in session for a total of 25 ½ days. It held six regularly scheduled sessions and three special sessions. At the first special session in May, it prepared for the postponed NPC session and secretly reviewed a draft of the upcoming NPC decision on Hong Kong. At the second one in late June, it adopted the Hong Kong National Security Law. And at its third special session in November, it passed the decision that disqualified four Hong Kong legislators. Meanwhile, the 13^th NPC met for its third annual session in late May. Altogether, the NPC and its Standing Committee enacted 10 new laws, approved major changes to 10, and reviewed another 17 legislative bills (see lists at the end of this section for details).

Although Hong Kong-related bills overshadowed all other legislation in 2020, there are still a few worth highlighting:

• Civil Code: On May 28, this year’s NPC session also approved China’s first statute styled as a code, the Civil Code [民法典]. With a total of 1260 articles, the Code is also the longest piece of legislation to date. We have discussed the Code’s significance and introduced its key provisions in this comprehensive guide.
• COVID-19 Response: To respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NPCSC adopted its first-ever special legislative plan, which seeks to revamp most of China’s public health legislation within two years. And to implement that legislative plan, the NPCSC in 2020 imposed a near-total ban on consuming wild animals, adopted a Biosecurity Law [生物安全法], toughened public health crimes in the Criminal Law Amendment (XI) [刑法修正案（十一）], and reviewed draft revisions to the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law [动物防疫法] and the Wild Animals Protection Law [野生动物保护法].
• Military Legislation: In 2020, the NPCSC reviewed an unusually large number of bills on military and defense affairs. It adopted the Veterans Support Law [退役军人保障法], revised the People’s Armed Police Law [人民武装警察法] and National Defense Law [国防法], and is considering five more bills on issues including the coast guard, military service, and the protection of military facilities.

The NPC Observer in 2020

In 2020, this Blog published 48 blogposts and received close to 112,000 pageviews (a roughly 60% increase over 2019) by almost 47,000 visitors from 166 jurisdictions worldwide. Readers in the United States contributed about 30% of the total traffic, followed by those from Hong Kong, mainland China, Germany, and the United Kingdom. And over 5,000 of you have followed us on Twitter or Facebook.

Our explainer of the NPC’s May decision on Hong Kong was the most viewed post in 2020, followed by our guide to China’s new Civil Code and summary of the Hong Kong National Security Law. The Civil Code page was the most viewed bill page™ in 2020, followed by those for the Export Control Law [出口管制法] and—again, the Hong Kong National Security Law.

Finally, we will note several improvements we made to our website in 2020. We redesigned the Sessions page and the pages archiving the State Council’s and the NPCSC’s public consultations. They now include more information and are easier to navigate. We also expanded our archives of the NPCSC’s work plans and its annual reports to the NPC. The work plans page now archives all its publicly available work plans, whereas the work reports page now links to all reports since 1980.

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That concludes our programming in 2020. Here’s to a better 2021.

Happy New Year!