UPDATE (Feb. 21, 2025): According to the spokesperson’s office of the NPCSC Legislative Affairs Commission, the draft Private Economy Promotion Law will not pass at the upcoming session as we expected, but will instead undergo a third and final review “as soon as possible.”
China’s top legislature, the 14th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), will convene for its fourteenth session from February 24 to 25, the Council of Chairpersons decided on Monday, February 17.
As expected, this two-day meeting will primarily make preparations for the NPC’s 2025 session, scheduled to open on March 5. Besides discussing its annual work report to the NPC, the NPCSC will review a proposed itemized agenda for the 2025 NPC session, among other preparatory matters. While the agenda will not be finalized until March 4, the NPCSC already previewed all the agenda items last December: routine work reports, government budgets, China’s annual socioeconomic development plan, and a legislative bill.
The NPCSC will also review two pieces of legislation at its upcoming session.
First, the draft Private Economy Promotion Law [民营经济促进法] returns for a second review. This bill has been on a legislative fast track since early 2024: Drafting began in February, before the project was included in the Communist Party’s Third Plenum decision in July. After a month-long public consultation in October, the State Council submitted the bill to the NPCSC last December. The bill’s latest public draft did not materially differ from the October 2024 version; it still mostly restated or referenced existing policies or laws and was short on enforceable provisions. During deliberations, lawmakers appear to have focused on proposing changes that would strengthen legislative oversight of governmental efforts to promote the private sector. We expect the bill to pass next week without major revisions.
Second, the State Council submitted a draft revision to the Civil Aviation Law [民用航空法]. This Law was originally enacted in 1995 and have undergone only six rounds of minor amendments since then. According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), efforts to overhaul the Law began in the 2000s, though it was not until mid-2016—before the four latest arounds of amendments—that the agency first released a draft for public comment. As the CAAC explained then, the revision would seek to improve safety regulation, promote the development of the civil aviation industry, strengthen consumer protections, and align the original Law with the 1999 Montreal Convention (which China ratified in 2005). The bill that the NPCSC will review next week might differ substantially from the 2016 draft, though the revision’s overall objectives should remain the same. In any event, we expect the bill to pass after three reviews.