Building Capacity Through Procedure

On June 24, the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) approved the first set of amendments to its Rules of Procedure (Rules) [全国人民代表大会常务委员会议事规则] in over a decade. The Rules are a national law that governs how the NPCSC conducts business. They regulate the convening and conduct of sessions, the submission and deliberation of bills and reports, debate and voting procedures, and other technical procedural matters.

The latest amendments came at what in retrospect could be a pivotal moment for the NPC. The Communist Party held its first-ever conference on improving the people’s congress system last October, and subsequently issued a policy document on the same subject (so far available only in summary form). Meanwhile, the national legislature has been undertaking a systematic effort to codify or update rules governing its powers and procedures, including the NPC’s organic statute and procedural rules as well as standalone instruments on the NPCSC’s oversight of the central budget, state-owned assets, and economic planning. For the most part, the amendments to the Rules reiterate key provisions in those laws and memorialize some of the NPCSC’s other existing practices.

Viewed in that larger context, the amendments make up part of a conscious effort to subtly enhance the NPCSC’s capacity as a lawmaking and oversight body—one that follows the Party’s commands itself and, acting as the Party’s agent, also ensures other state organs do the same. The amended Rules therefore leave room for both deliberation and efficiency in the legislative process, and institutionalize procedural tools that enable more rigorous NPCSC oversight.

Continue reading “Building Capacity Through Procedure”

NPCSC Session Watch: Antitrust, Telecom Fraud, Enforcement of Court Judgments & More

The Council of Chairpersons decided on May 30 to convene the 35th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) from June 21 to 24. Eight bills are on the tentative agenda, which we briefly preview below.

Continue reading “NPCSC Session Watch: Antitrust, Telecom Fraud, Enforcement of Court Judgments & More”

The Chinese Legislature’s Hidden Agenda

On February 9, I published in The Diplomat an article titled The Chinese Legislature’s Hidden Agenda. It begins this way:

For about a decade, China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), made real improvements to its transparency. In 2008, it started soliciting public comments once on almost every major bill. Since 2013, it has been asking for comments multiple times for the same bill. In 2015, it codified “legislative openness” as a guiding principle for lawmaking. Most recently, in the summer of 2019, the NPC established a spokesperson’s office to offer greater and more regular disclosure of its legislative activities, including brief summaries of public input on draft legislation.

In the past two years, however, the legislature has appeared increasingly tempted to embrace the secrecy afforded by the Great Hall of the People. It has been withholding legislative drafts at a greater frequency—five in 2020–2021 alone versus five total during 2015–2019. It has also started to hide certain bills on its legislative agenda from the public until shortly before or, worse, until after their adoption. This practice not only departs from the legislature’s transparency norm, but is also at odds with the party-state’s legal reform agenda and recent official rhetoric on China’s political system. Yet the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) is now poised to write this practice into law, in effect guaranteeing its continued use, and once again highlighting the party-state’s competing desires for legal predictability and flexibility.

In this post, I will share the data underlying this article and discuss more arcana of the NPCSC’s agenda-disclosure practice. I thus highly recommend that you read the above article first before continuing.

Continue reading “The Chinese Legislature’s Hidden Agenda”