A slogan reading “Speak Putonghua, Write Standard Characters” in a Guangzhou secondary school. Photo by Gzdavidwong (Wikimedia Commons). CC BY-SA 3.0.
China’s top legislature, the 14th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), will convene for its seventeenth session from September 8 to 12, the Council of Chairpersons decided on Tuesday, August 26. According to the Council’s proposed agenda, the session will consider 16 legislative bills—the most so far during this five-year term—and hear 8 oversight reports, among other business. As usual, we preview the session’s legislative agenda in detail below.
This post is the second and final part of our coverage of China’s revised Public Security Administration Punishments Law (PSAPL) [治安管理处罚法], approved by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) on June 27 and set to go into effect on New Year’s Day. As introduced in Part 1 in more detail, the PSAPL authorizes the police to punish what are deemed minor offenses against the public order through administrative processes outside the criminal justice system. Part 1 focuses on several broader issues that arose during the revision process: the use of administrative detention, the availability of detention hearings, and the vagueness of certain offenses. This part will more comprehensively survey the changes in the revision, though it is still not intended to be exhaustive.
The PSAPL can be roughly divided into three parts: general rules on liability and punishment; offenses and penalties; and procedures for investigating and penalizing public security violations. This post will proceed in the same order. We will draw on Jeremy Daum’s overview of the revision’s first draft as well as a recent explainer by the NPCSC Legislative Affairs Commission (LAC).1 For additional information on the revised PSAPL, please see this English translation by China Law Translate or this Chinese-language comparison chart we have prepared. Inline page citations are to the LAC article, while inline statutory references are to the revised PSAPL unless context indicates otherwise.
Chinese traffic police officer stands on duty on the street in Beijing. Photo by Phuong (stock.adobe.com).
On June 27, 2025, China’s national legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), approved an overhaul of the 2005 Public Security Administration Punishments Law (PSAPL) [治安管理处罚法], bringing a 12-year legislative marathon to a close. The revised PSAPL will enter into force on January 1, 2026.
The PSAPL sits at the intersection of Chinese criminal law and administrative law. On the one hand, it is a penal statute that defines “violations of public security administration”: relatively minor public order offenses that generally correspond to more serious “crimes” in the Criminal Law [刑法]. These violations are punishable with warnings, fines, license revocations, and even detention of up to 15 days (or up to 20 days for multiple offenses). The PSAPL also lays down the procedures for investigating and punishing the violations, so it is like the Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law [刑事诉讼法] rolled into one. On the other hand, the PSAPL skirts the normal criminal justice process, authorizing the police to penalize public security violations by themselves through nominally administrative proceedings. It incorporates most of the procedures under the Administrative Punishments Law [行政处罚法] and the Administrative Coercion Law [行政强制法]—which regulate, respectively, administrative punishments (e.g., fines and detention) and coercive administrative measures (e.g., investigative restraints on physical liberty and property seizures)—while adapting them to the public security context.
As the first meaningful update of the PSAPL in 20 years, the revision has introduced too many changes to recount individually. To summarize, it has tweaked the general rules of liability and punishments; added around 30 new offenses to the original 152 and modified about 20 others; increased fines across the board; and refined investigatory and decisionmaking procedures.
We will cover the revision in two parts. In this first part, we will delve into a few major changes (or sets of changes), drawing on a recent explainer by Zhang Yijian, a division head in the Office for Criminal Law within the NPCSC Legislative Affairs Commission (LAC).1 Though necessarily biased and self-congratulatory—the article portrays a legislature that tempered the more aggressive draft prepared by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS)—it explains in detail why certain changes were or weren’t made, offers glimpses of behind-the-scenes debates, and candidly acknowledges some flaws in the PSAPL regime. In the next part, we will take a more comprehensive look at the changes but without detailed analysis.
The 14th NPC Standing Committee will convene for its seventeenth session in late August. The Council of Chairpersons is expected to meet in mid-August to decide on the agenda and dates of the session.
China’s national legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), is soliciting public comment on the following ten bills through July 26, 2025.
English translations will be provided if available. All explanatory documents are in Chinese and compiled in a single PDF; the links above will take you to the corresponding pages in the PDF only if you use a desktop browser—this does not work on a phone or a tablet.
UPDATE (June 27, 2025): On June 27, the NPCSC approved revisions to the Public Security Administration Punishments Law (effective Jan. 1, 2026) and to the Anti–Unfair Competition Law (effective Oct. 15, 2025). It also removed Miao Hua as a member of the PRC Central Military Commission and ratified the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation, among the other actions taken.
China’s top legislature, the 14th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), will convene for its sixteenth session from June 24 to 27, the Council of Chairpersons decided on Monday, June 16. According to the Council’s proposed agenda, the session will consider twelve legislative bills, hear three oversight reports, and ratify the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation—which China signed on May 30 as a founding member. As usual, we preview the session’s legislative agenda in detail below.
Caption and opening lines of the NPCSC’s 2025 oversight plan.
A few weeks ago, on May 14, 2025, China’s national legislature, the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC), released its 2025 oversight plan. Today, after an eight-year hiatus, we are resuming coverage of this annual document on this site. We begin with some background before delving into the 2025 plan itself.
The full NPCSC conducts oversight primarily by reviewing reports, either submitted by the state organs subject to its oversight or produced by its subordinate bodies. Every year since 2010, it has also held two or three “special inquiries” [专题询问]—essentially Q&A sessions where lawmakers question officials on specific issues—to supplement its review of selected reports. These inquiries, as well as the follow-up oversight measures available to the NPCSC after it hears a report, are discussed here.
Here is our recap of NPC-related events in June 2025 at our newsletter.
The Preschool Education Law [学前教育法] (adopted on Nov. 8, 2024) and the amendment to the Supervision Law [监察法] (adopted on Dec. 25, 2024) take effect on June 1.
The 14th NPCSC will convene for its sixteenth session in late June. The Council of Chairpersons is expected to meet in mid-June to decide on the agenda and dates of the session.
In addition, the session is expected to review the newly submitted Healthcare Security Law [医疗保障法] and amendment to the Food Safety Law [食品安全法], and may also take up one or more of the other bills scheduled for an initial review this year by the NPCSC’s 2025 legislative work plan.
Editor’s Note: After a fast-tracked legislative process spanning just over a year, China’s national legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, approved the Private Economy Promotion Law [民营经济促进法] on April 30. During that time, it reviewed the bill at three consecutive sessions—in December 2024, February 2025, and April 2025—and published (only) the first draft for public comment. Following the Law’s second review, friend of the site and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center Jamie P. Horsley authored a commentary for the Brookings Institution, in which she argues:
The first draft . . . contains little new in terms of legal or policy initiatives, apart from its somewhat problematic definition of promoted private businesses. It restates existing policies and legal requirements that have failed to resolve the sector’s legal challenges, emphasizes political correctness, and seems unlikely to succeed on its own to substantially reassure private investors and spark entrepreneurial enthusiasm. [And] the draft notably excludes majority foreign-owned companies and maintains a segregation of the Chinese economy into state, [domestic] private, and foreign-owned sectors.
In this follow-up piece, Horsley highlights notable new clauses in the Law’s final version and identifies several measures that lawmakers could have incorporated to improve government compliance with the Law but ultimately did not.
By Jamie P. Horsley
Neon signs on Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s main shopping district. Photo by Luciano Mortula-LGM (stock.adobe.com).
China’s first “foundational” [基础性] law intended to support and regulate its crucial domestic private sector, the Private Economy Promotion Law (PEPL), was promulgated on April 30 and takes effect on May 20, 2025. In official commentary surrounding its drafting and adoption, authorities recognized that the private sector has faced “difficulties and challenges in terms of fair participation in market competition, equal use of production factors, obtaining investment and financing support and service guarantees, and protection of legitimate rights and interests,” due in large part, as the PEPL makes clear, to Chinese government failures to abide by legal requirements. Official commentary also asserted that the PEPL now provides a legal guarantee and institutional support for its “sustained, healthy, and high-quality development.” However, the final PEPL, like the earlier drafts discussed in my previous analysis, contains little new in terms of substantive legal requirements, protections, or policy. It rather serves to emphasize and fortify pre-existing laws—including the state Constitution—and policies that apply to, but have not been uniformly and fairly implemented with respect to, the private sector.
