Full Text: Work report of NPC Standing Committee

3. We provided a legal guarantee for relevant reforms.

In working to bring legislation into line with China's reform, we revised and improved laws related to reform in a timely manner, issued decisions on relevant pilot reforms, and heard and deliberated reports on the progress of pilot reforms. We have thus been able to ensure that reform and rule of law complement and reinforce one another. 

1) We revised multiple laws using a coordinated approach, in a continued effort to support the reform of the government review and approval system.

For specific articles from different laws that deal with similar issues or the same matter and need to be revised for the sake of a reform, our approach is to issue a decision for revisions to be made across laws by putting forward multiple drafts at the same time. This is an important method we adopt to promote the relevant reform through legislation. Over the past four years, using this approach, we have deliberated and approved 13 such revision decisions, revising 74 laws and decisions on legal issues. In 2016, we deliberated and adopted the decision to revise six laws at the same time, including the Energy Conservation Law and the Law on the Prevention and Control of Occupational Diseases, as well as the decision to revise 12 laws, including the Foreign Trade Law, the Customs Law, and the Coal Industry Law. We thus made consistent changes to their articles pertaining to government review and approval or verification of professional qualifications and related matters.

2) We issued authorization decisions in accordance with the law to provide legal basis for pilot reforms.

We authorized the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate to pilot a system of sentence bargaining in criminal cases in 18 cities including Beijing. Meanwhile, we reviewed our experiences with the pilot project of accelerated procedures for certain criminal cases that we authorized in 2014 to be carried out in these 18 cities, and incorporated this pilot project into the pilot sentence bargaining system to expand, improve, and continue running it under the new pilot system. We heard and deliberated the mid-term report of the Supreme People's Court on the pilot reform of the system of people's assessors, and that of the Supreme People's Procuratorate on the pilot reform for the filing of public interest litigation by procuratorates. We demanded that guidance and oversight be stepped up and a comprehensive evaluation of the results of these pilot reforms be made so as to accumulate experience for revising and improving relevant laws.

In order to ensure law-based advancement of the pilot reforms concerning a salary system for public servants based on both position and rank, incorporation of the maternity insurance into the basic medical insurance scheme, and the system of military officers, we deliberated and passed three separate decisions on making provisional adjustments to the applicability of certain stipulations in relevant laws, so as to guarantee that these pilot reforms are carried on in line with the rule of law.

3) We reviewed our experiences with pilot reforms and enabled the spread of applicable practices to more regions by revising and improving relevant laws. 

We have remained committed to advancing reform on the basis of rule of law and strengthening the rule of law through reform. For reform measures that require preliminary trials, we shall authorize the necessary trials in accordance with the law; for reform measures that have proved to be effective in practice and are ready to be applied to other regions, we shall act in a timely manner to review these measures and revise and improve relevant laws accordingly. In 2013 and 2014 we issued two decisions authorizing the State Council to make provisional adjustments to items requiring government review as prescribed by certain laws in the pilot free trade zones in Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin, and Fujian. After considering the motion that the State Council had put forward on the basis of its thorough review of experiences gained from the trials, last year we made a coordinated effort to revise the Law on Foreign-Funded Enterprises and three other laws at the same time. We thus elevated the reform measures tested out in pilot free trade zones into provisions of law, and correspondingly terminated the two authorization decisions.