Tag: supervision commission

Explainer: China to Amend the Constitution for the Fifth Time (UPDATED)

UPDATE (Jan. 25, 2018): This post has been updated to reflect recent developments.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported on December 27 that the Politburo decided to convene the Second Plenum of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party in January 2018. The main agenda of the Plenum is to “discuss and study proposals for amending part of [China’s current] Constitution,” which was adopted in 1982 and later amended four times in 1988, 1993, 1999, and 2004. Under Chinese law (and a key CPC policy document), the constitutional amendment process essentially includes three steps. In this post, we will explain each step in turn and point out the key events to watch during the next several months.

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Next Steps for the Supervision Law & Procedural Possibility of a Constitutional Amendment in 2018

Now that the draft Supervision Law has finally become public, many are probably wondering what the next steps for the Law would be. When will the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) consider the draft Law again, if at all? Will the NPCSC release a revised version of the draft for public comments? And, given the argument that the Law shouldn’t be enacted until after the Constitution is amended to grant supervision commissions constitutional status, is it procedurally possible for the NPC to consider (and pass) a constitutional amendment at next year’s session? To predict such developments, we surveyed the legislative history of the laws passed by the NPC since 2000 (when the Legislation Law was enacted) and of all constitutional amendments to the 1982 P.R.C. Constitution.

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A Guide to Supervision System Reform (Redux)

The NPCSC decided last Saturday to extend “pilot” reforms of the state supervision (or anti-corruption) system nationwide. The decision is nearly identical in substance to the NPCSC’s December 2016 decision to first implement supervision system reforms in Beijing, Shanxi, and Zhejiang. The decision on Saturday again prescribes the composition, duties, and powers of the supervision commissions, and lists the legal provisions that will no longer be enforced across China, effectively repealing them. The contents of the Saturday decision are described below, with additional details.

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2017 NPC Session: Press Conference Provides First Look at NPCSC’s Tasks in 2017

The 5th Session of the 12th National People’s Congress (NPC) held its first press conference earlier on Saturday. The spokeswoman for the Session, Fu Ying, who is also Chairwoman of the NPC Foreign Affairs Committee, answered a total of 15 questions from both Chinese and foreign journalists. While her answers on China’s 2017 national defense budget made headlines elsewhere, here we’ll focus instead on what she revealed about the top legislature’s tasks planned for 2017.

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25th Session Watch Pt. 4: More Information on the State Supervision System Reform (UPDATED)

Update (Nov. 6, 2017): This post has been superseded by this one, published on November 5, 2017.

Update (Feb. 13, 2017): This post has been updated to clarify the range of personnel subject to supervision by the supervision commissions.

In the decision to carry out pilots programs of the state supervision system reform, the NPCSC details the composition, duties, and powers of the supervision commissions (see here for our prior discussion of this reform), as well as the legal provisions that will no longer be enforced in the pilot regions. The main content is summarized below, followed by a few comments.

An English translation of the Decision is underway at China Law Translate.

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25th Session Watch Pt. 1: NPCSC to Consider E-Commerce Law and Several Reform Authorizations

The 12th NPCSC will convene for its next session, which will be the last one in 2016, from December 19 to 25, the Council of Chairmen decided on Monday. The Council also proposed a preliminary agenda for the 25th Session, which features six legislative bills, three authorizations of reforms, and several items pertaining to next year’s NPC plenary session and the upcoming 13th NPC. As usual, in the first part of this installment of Session Watch, we’ll take a look at the agenda of the upcoming session.

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China to Overhaul Anti-Corruption System (UPDATED)

Update (Nov. 6, 2017): For more information on the supervision commissions, please see this post. The first draft of the Supervision Law (监察法) is available here.

Nov. 25 Update: As reported by Xinhua, Wang Qishan, who now heads the new Central Leading Group for Pilot Work on Deepening Reform of the State Supervision System, said today that the Party will ask the NPCSC for an authorization before formally proceeding with the pilot projects. He also confirmed that the new supervision commissions will be composed of the soon-to-be-former administrative departments of supervision and corruption prevention, and also of the subdivisions of the procuratorates that investigate official duty crimes. The first step of the pilots, according to Wang, is to transfer those subdivisions from the procuratorates to the supervision commissions. He also hinted that a State Supervision Law will be adopted in the future, and which will most likely replace the current Administrative Supervision Law.

On November 7, as your author observed, the NPCSC removed the head of the Ministry of Supervision but left the position open. News from later that day explained the unusual move: The Communist Party plans to reform the state supervision system (国家监察体制) and has deployed pilot projects in Beijing, Shanxi, and Zhejiang. It seems that the Ministry of Supervision will in a few years become history. Below, this post will introduce the specifics of the reform that have since been made public, and will discuss how the reform will concern the NPC and lower-level people’s congresses.

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