Explainer: What Happens to the Delegate Bills Introduced During Annual NPC Sessions?

China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), will convene for its 2024 session in just a month. Such annual gatherings offer the NPC’s almost 3,000 delegates a yearly window to introduce “bills” [议案]. A bill is sponsored by 30 or more delegates or by a delegation, and calls on the legislature itself—not any other Party-state institution—to perform an act, legislative or otherwise. The vast majority of bills have been “legislative bills” [法律案]—that is, they propose to enact, amend, repeal, interpret, or codify laws. During the last two NPCs (2013–2022), the delegates introduced an average of 465 bills per year and all but a few (~98%) were legislative bills.1

(The delegates’ bills therefore differ from their “suggestions,” the shorthand for three other types of submissions: “suggestions, criticisms, and opinions” [建议、批评和意见]. Suggestions require only one sponsor each and can be addressed to a wide range of Party-state institutions, most commonly State Council agencies. While suggestions, like bills, may propose legislation, they are outside the scope of this explainer.)

Delegate bills are not publicly available. Many nonetheless become the subject of intense online debates in China during the annual “Two Sessions” period, thanks to domestic media coverage. In 2022, for instance, in the wake of the Xuzhou chained woman incident earlier that year, a raft of delegate bills proposing heavier criminal penalties for buying trafficked women received strong public attention and support.

Yet anyone with even a passing familiarity with the NPC knows that it does not act on delegate bills—or at least has not done so in a long time. So what happens to the bills after they are introduced? Where can one learn about a bill’s fate? And what role, if any, do delegate bills play in Chinese lawmaking? Below we discuss these questions in turn.

Procedure for Reviewing Delegate Bills

The presiding body of an NPC session, the Presidium [主席团], has the statutory authority to decide whether to place a delegate bill on the session’s agenda so that the full NPC will consider and vote on it. In practice, the Presidium acts on the recommendation of the session’s Secretariat [秘书处], a smaller ad hoc body with a professional staff that screens submitted bills. And in the past 45 years, no delegate bill—except for one in 19932—was recommended for plenary consideration by an ongoing NPC session.3 Recent Secretariat reports to the Presidium all contain the effectively boilerplate language that it has “carefully analyzed and studied each of the bills submitted by the delegates and considers that no bill needs to be added to the session’s agenda for deliberation.”

The Secretariat makes the same recommendation year after year for two main reasons. The first has to do with NPC sessions’ highly choreographed nature. A session’s agenda and schedule are practically set in advance, and rarely leave room for contingencies like new delegate bills. And, as one former NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) official candidly writes, allowing newly submitted delegate bills to be added to the agenda could introduce “uncertain and uncontrollable factors” and create complications.4 Second, an important shortcoming of the bills makes them unsuitable for immediate consideration by the full NPC. While the legislative bills submitted by government institutions must include draft texts and accompanying explanations, the NPC has diluted this requirement for delegate bills, providing only that they should “ideally” include such contents. As a result, only about half of delegate bills have included legislative texts, based on limited official data.5 The rest presumably included only the minimum required by law: a succinct summary of the bill’s legislative goal, a lengthier explanation of the relevant issues and justifications for legislation, and specific legislative proposals (without an actionable text).

So instead of plenary discussion by the NPC, delegates bills have been referred to the various NPC special committees (there are now ten) based on their respective subject matter jurisdictions.6 Over the next four to six months, the special committees would in turn forward each bill to the relevant Party-state institutions, including Communist Party bodies, State Council agencies, and other quasi-governmental bodies (e.g., the All-China Women’s Federation), to seek their opinions on the bill’s proposals. The special committees would also communicate with the bill sponsors to further hear their views. Towards the end of the year, each special committee would report to the NPCSC on those efforts and its recommended disposition for each delegate bill referred to it.

NPC Special Committee Reports on Delegate Bills

By convention, the special committees deliver the reports on their deliberations to the NPCSC in two groups each October and December, respectively. The specific groupings vary from year to year, as indicated by the parentheses below.

  • October: Supervisory and Judicial Affairs Committee; Financial and Economic Affairs Committee; Foreign Affairs Committee; Environmental Protection and Resource Conservation Committee; Social Development Affairs Committee; (Ethnic Affairs Committee [EAC]; and (Education, Science, Culture & Public Health Committee [ESCPHC]).
  • December: Constitution and Law Committee; Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee; Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee; (EAC; and ESCPHC).

These reports are a rich source of information that is mostly overlooked outside China. Each report would group the relevant delegate bills by the (proposed) law at issue. And for each group of bills, the report would briefly summarize their legislative proposals and arguments, describe other Party-state institutions’ views on the bills as well as related legislative and policy developments, and end with the special committee’s own recommended action. The reports are posted (often incompletely) on the NPC website soon after the relevant NPCSC session ends, and are eventually published in full in the NPCSC Gazette, the legislature’s official publication.

To illustrate, consider the excerpt from the ESCPHC’s 2023 report on a delegate bill to enact an Artificial Intelligence Law [人工智能法]. According to the report, the bill argues that there is a myriad of pressing issues with the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), including safety, ethics, and privacy concerns. The bill thus proposes to enact an AI Law to protect human rights, regulate AI ethics, set up an appropriate regulatory framework, and further international cooperation and standardization. (This is the usual level of detail included in such a report.) The report then notes key recent developments in China’s AI regulation and discloses that the relevant State Council agencies have carried out preliminary research on AI legislation, in particular issues such as AI privacy protection and tort liability. Finally, the Committee promises to research major issues in AI legislation and urge the relevant State Council agencies to study and incorporate the bill’s proposals and accelerate the drafting process, so that an AI Law may be included in an annual NPCSC legislative work plan “when the conditions are ripe.”

There is no prescribed list of recommendations that the special committees must choose from, and the actions recommended indeed vary among the committees and even among the reports by the same committee. Generally speaking, the committees have disposed of delegate bills in one of the following five ways, based on how likely their proposals might become law:

  • For a delegate bill proposing legislation that was enacted later that year, the relevant committee has generally noted that the bill’s proposals were carefully studied and incorporated to some extent into the enacted legislation.
  • For a delegate bill concerning legislation still under legislative review, the Constitution and Law Committee (which reviews all such delegate bills) has generally vowed to carefully study the bill’s proposals and “actively” incorporate them into the pending legislation.
  • For a delegate bill concerning a project already listed in an NPCSC legislative plan, the relevant committee has generally recommended that the drafting entity (itself or another body) carefully study the bill’s proposals, incorporate them where possible, and speed up the drafting process. The committee has also generally disclosed the latest on the project’s status—information that might not be publicly available elsewhere.
  • For a delegate bill concerning a project that was not in any NPCSC legislative plan but should be, the committee has generally recommended that it be included in a legislative plan in due course, or that the relevant department carefully study the issues raised by the bill and put forward legislative proposals in due course.
  • For a delegate bill proposing legislation deemed unripe or inadvisable, the committee has, for instance, noted that existing policies or lower-level legislation (e.g., administrative regulations) has already addressed the issues raised by the bill; or recommended the enactment of lower-level norms before passing a law; or urged better enforcement of existing legislation to address the issues raised by the bill.

Role of Delegate Bills in Lawmaking

Because the NPC (including its Standing Committee)7 never directly acted on any delegates-sponsored legislative bill in the last four decades, delegate bills have only an “indirect”8 impact on its lawmaking. In an empirical study published in 2017, Xing Binwen, now a law professor at Jilin University, reviewed all special committee reports from 1983 to 2015 covering 10,072 delegate bills, and observes that such bills can indirectly influence Chinese lawmaking in four main ways.9

First, delegate bills can shape the NPCSC’s and the State Council’s legislative plans. There is evidence that several major laws, including the 1993 Law on the Protection of Consumers’ Rights and Interests [消费者权益保护法], were added to official legislative plans, drafted, and enacted because of “forward-looking” delegate bills from years prior.10 More recently, in 2021, a delegate bill to enact a Black Soil Protection Law [黑土地保护法] prompted the NPC Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee to draft and submit such a draft law in the same year. Since 2015, the Legislation Law [立法法] has explicitly required the NPCSC to consider delegate bills and suggestions when drawing up legislative plans—the reason why it does not finalize its annual legislative plans until after annual NPC sessions.

Second, delegate bills can drive the implementation of official legislative plans. By persistently focusing on the projects already included in those plans, Prof. Xing argues, delegate bills have become “an important way to build legislative consensus” and “an important [driving] force” behind the promulgation of the relevant laws and regulations, especially the more “complex” or “difficult” ones.11 Because the bills obligate the relevant drafting entities to annually disclose their progress in public reports, they have created not only “an important channel for the disclosure of legislative procedural information,” but also “a dynamic oversight process.”

Third, delegate bills can influence the substance of government-sponsored bills, whether they are still being drafted or already under legislative review. Drafting entities and NPC bodies all claim to pay special attention to the views expressed in delegate bills. While there is no evidence calling that into doubt, it is difficult, as Prof. Xing points out, to quantify the extent to which delegate bills exert such an influence because they are not accessible to the public. In a rare case from 2007, the NPCSC adopted an amendment to the Civil Procedure Law [民事诉讼法] that was primarily based on a delegate bill submitted earlier that year.12 This has so far been a one-off occurrence, given the dearth of delegate bills with well-crafted legislative texts.

Finally, even when delegates bills fail to affect official legislative agendas or shape government-drafted legislation, they can still pressure the relevant government agencies to improve enforcement of existing law, or force them to acknowledge gaps or inconsistencies in existing law even though the sorely needed reforms continue to proceed at glacial speed. For instance, as Prof. Xing notes, NPC delegates have for years proposed the enactment of a Household Registration Law [户籍法] to replace the NPCSC’s 1954 Household Registration Regulations [户口登记条例].13 The bills prompted the NPC Internal and Judicial Affairs Committee to acknowledge, back in 2002, that new legislation was needed because the Regulations “no longer met practical needs, have to some extent constrained and hindered social development and progress,” and “had provisions that conflict with [several later-enacted laws].” To date, no such law has been submitted, but the project was listed, for the first time, as a formal project in an NPCSC five-year legislative plan last fall. Long-awaited reforms may be finally afoot.

We will cover the special committees’ reports on the delegate bills submitted during the 2023 NPC session in the next issue of our newsletter.

  1. The other bills proposed either quasi-legislative decisions (which are not considered “laws” [法律] in the narrow sense) or oversight actions (e.g., inspecting the enforcement of laws). ↩︎
  2. During the 1993 NPC session, the Guangdong delegation submitted a bill to authorize the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) to establish a Preliminary Working Committee (PWC) to prepare for the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong, ahead of the scheduled establishment of a Preparatory Committee for Hong Kong in 1996. Four days later, the Presidium added the bill to the session’s agenda, and the NPC approved the requested authorization a week thereafter. ↩︎
  3. A delegate bill submitted in 1993 to grant Xiamen broader power to legislate for its special economic zone was adopted by the NPC a year later—and only after the NPCSC had considered it first. In 1994, a delegate bill to abolish the original “through-train” arrangement for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s first Legislative Council was recommended for consideration by the NPCSC instead and adopted by the latter a few months later. ↩︎
  4. 李伯钧 [Li Bojun], 代表议案难以列入大会议程的思考 [Reflections on the Difficulty of Placing Delegate Bills on the Agendas of People’s Congress Sessions], 人大研究 [People’s Cong. Stud.], no. 1, 2020, at 31, 33. ↩︎
  5. The percentage was 51.8% in 2021, the last year when such data is available. ↩︎
  6. The Constitution and Law Committee (formerly the Law Committee) is responsible for bills concerning (1) then-pending legislation; (2) “basic laws” under the PRC Constitution, such as the Criminal Law [刑法]; or (3) matters not obviously within the jurisdiction of another special committee. See 邢斌文 [Xing Binwen], 全国人大代表立法提案的实证研究——基于《全国人大常委会公报》（1983–2015） [An Empirical Study of NPC Delegates’ Legislative Proposals Based on the NPC Standing Committee Gazette (1983–2015)], 20 行政法论丛 [Admin. L. Rev.] 183, 187 (2017). ↩︎
  7. The three bills mentioned in footnotes 2 and 3 were not technically legislative bills. ↩︎
  8. Xing, supra note 6, at 189. ↩︎
  9. See id. at 189–95. ↩︎
  10. Id. at 190. ↩︎
  11. Id. at 191. ↩︎
  12. The bill’s lead sponsor, Jiang Bixin, then president of the Hunan provincial high court, was promoted to a vice president of the Supreme People’s Court in December 2007. ↩︎
  13. See id. at 195. ↩︎
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