NPCSC Session Watch: VAT, Anti-Corruption, Private Sector Promotion, Law Propaganda & Unfair Competition

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UPDATE (Dec. 26, 2024): On December 25, the NPCSC approved the Value-Added Tax Law (effective Jan. 1, 2026); amended the Supervision Law (effective June 1, 2025); and revised the Science and Technology Popularization Law (effective immediately).

Poster has the text "abiding by laws and popularizing laws is everyone's responsibility."
“Law popularization” propaganda poster released by the justice bureau of Qingyuan, Guangdong in 2021.

China’s top legislature, the 14th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), will convene for its thirteenth session from December 21 to 25, the Council of Chairpersons decided on Friday, December 13. The Council proposed an agenda with ten legislative bills and several reports that might be of interest, which we preview below. It also approved the NPCSC’s 2025 work priorities as well as 2025 plans for legislative, oversight, delegates-related, and foreign affairs work; these documents will be finalized next April, and at least the first four will be publicly released thereafter.

Returning Bills

Five bills have been scheduled for further review.

First, the draft amendment to the Law on the Delegates to the National People’s Congress and Local People’s Congresses [全国人民代表大会和地方各级人民代表大会代表法] returns for its second review. The NPCSC is expected to submit this bill to the NPC’s 2025 session for a final review, and we will provide coverage in due course.

Second, the draft Value-Added Tax Law [增值税法] returns for its third—and most likely final—review.

Third, the following bills return for a second review. They will likely pass at the upcoming session, but we do not rule out the possibility of a third and final review in the near future.

New Bills

Five new bills have been submitted for review.

The NPC Supervisory and Judicial Affairs Committee submitted a draft Law on Publicity and Education on the Rule of Law [法治宣传教育法]. The Communist Party’s efforts to disseminate legal knowledge among the Chinese population are as old as its rule, but it did not turn law propaganda into “a regular, systematized, and institutionalized practice” until 1985.1 That year, the Party and the State Council issued a five-year plan to popularize “common legal knowledge” among citizens, followed by an NPCSC resolution on the same subject that kicked off the effort nationwide. Since then, “law popularization” [普法] has continued under quinquennial NPCSC resolutions and detailed five-year plans issued by central propaganda and justice authorities. The currently operative 8th five-year plan, adopted in 2021, outlines an array of law-popularization initiatives: for instance, promoting the Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law; disseminating knowledge about key legal instruments such as the Constitution and the Civil Code; increasing the readiness of citizens, especially cadres and the youth, to abide by laws through education and practice; and requiring governmental bodies to popularize the law as part of legislative, administrative, and judicial processes. The Law is expected to codify established law-propaganda practices that have been in use for the last four decades. We expect it to pass after two reviews.

The State Council submitted the other four bills:

  • Draft Private Economy Promotion Law [民营经济促进法]. As private business confidence has waned after recent regulatory crackdowns, Chinese authorities had begun drafting the Law by early 2024, before the Party included it in the reform to-do list at the Third Plenum in July. In October, the Ministry of Justice and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly released a draft for public comment. The draft includes chapters on ensuring fair competition, improving investment and financing for private businesses, supporting their technological innovations, improving government services and support, and protecting the rights of private businesses and entrepreneurs. Notwithstanding its rhetoric, the draft mostly restates or references existing policies or legal provisions and, as experts have pointed out, is short on enforceable rules. According to the readout of China’s recent Central Economic Work Conference, this Law will pass in 2025.
  • Draft revision to the Anti–Unfair Competition Law [反不正当竞争法]. The NPCSC originally passed this Law in 1993 and updated it for the first time in 2017. Just two years after that overhaul, the NPCSC made important amendments to its trade-secret provisions. According to the State Administration for Market Regulation, it initiated the current round of revision in late 2021. As an earlier draft (zh | en) shows, the revision seeks to promote fair competition in the digital economy; improve provisions on commercial bribery, acts of confusion, false commercial publicity, and trade secrets; and prohibit abusing “positions of relative advantage” and malicious trading. We expect the revision to pass after two or three reviews.
  • Draft revision to the Fisheries Law [渔业法]. First enacted in 1986 and last substantially updated in 2004, this Law regulates aquaculture, fishing, as well as the sustainable management and conservation of fishery resources. The proposed revision has been more than a decade in the making. According to the draft released by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in 2019, the revision would increase protections for aquatic genetic resources, better control fishing intensity, improve regulation of aquaculture and distant-water fishing, strengthen safety regulations for fishing vessels, and beef up law enforcement capacity. We expect the revision to pass after two or three reviews.
  • Draft Hazardous Chemicals Safety Law [危险化学品安全法]. Efforts to draft a statute regulating hazardous chemicals first began after the deadly chemical explosions at the Port of Tianjin in August 2015. The process sped up after the establishment of the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM) in 2018 and another fatal explosion at a chemical plant in Xiangshui, Jiangsu in March 2019. In late 2020, the MEM released for public comment a draft based on the State Council’s 2011 hazardous-chemical regulations (as amended). The draft would regulate the registration and identification of hazardous chemicals; the planning and layout of manufacturing and storage facilities; the manufacture, storage, use, sale, and transport of such chemicals; the disposal of hazardous wastes; and emergency response to safety incidents involving such chemicals. We expect the Law to pass after two or three reviews.

The NPCSC will also review several oversight reports at the upcoming session, including its Legislative Affairs Commission’s annual report on “recording and review” and the State Supervision Commission’s report on “efforts to eliminate misconduct and corruption that occur at people’s doorsteps.” For the full list of reports, please see this post.

  1. Jennifer Altehenger, Legal Lessons: Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989, at 225 (2018). ↩︎