July 2024: A First Look at NPC Delegates’ 2024 Legislative Proposals
NPC-related reforms in the Third Plenum Decision. Plus: my recent coauthored article on sexual harassment cases in Chinese courts.
Welcome back to NPC Observer Monthly, a monthly newsletter about China’s national legislature: the National People’s Congress (NPC) and its Standing Committee (NPCSC).
Each issue will start with “News of the Month,” a recap of major NPC-related events from the previous month, with links to any coverage we have published on our main site, NPC Observer. If, during that month, we have also written posts that aren’t tied to current events, I’ll then provide a round-up in “Non-News of the Month.” Finally, depending on the month and my schedule, I may end an issue with discussions of an NPC-related topic that is in some way connected to the past month.
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News of the Month
On July 15–18, the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party held its Third Plenum, where it adopted the Resolution on Further Deepening Reform Comprehensively to Advance Chinese-Style Modernization [关于进一步全面深化改革 推进中国式现代化的决定]. I made a bilingual version of the Resolution, available in both HTML and PDF.
In this post, we surveyed the three categories of reform measures that the national legislature would play a role in implementing: (1) reforms of the NPC itself and local people’s congresses; (2) explicit legislative tasks for the NPC; and (3) other reforms that would require NPC action.
On July 18, the Plenum’s communiqué (zh | en) revealed that the Central Committee had accepted the request of former foreign minister and state councilor Qin Gang to resign from the body. The next day, and probably not coincidentally, the NPC’s official website belatedly posted the NPCSC Gazette’s second issue of the year, which includes a report by the NPCSC Delegate Credentials Committee disclosing that Qin requested to resign from the NPC “for personal reasons” in February.1
2024 NPC Delegate Bills
The main reason I brought up the Gazette’s second issue of 2024 is another belatedly disclosed document: a list of bills that NPC delegates introduced during the NPC session in March.
Short of posting the entirety of delegate bills, the NPC releases new information about them three times during a year. First, after the window for submitting bills closes during an NPC session, the session’s secretariat would process the bills and submit a report to the session’s presidium. The report includes basic data about the bills, a breakdown of the bills by theme and a few examples for each theme, and the secretariat’s recommended disposition—which has invariably been referring the bills to the NPC’s special committees for review after the session, instead of plenary consideration by the NPC.
Such reports are posted online soon after they are submitted to the presidium. We thus have known since March that 298 bills2 were submitted this year—26 by delegations and the rest by groups of 30 or more delegates—and that almost all proposed legislation. Of the 292 legislative bills, 156 proposed new laws, 134 suggested amendments to existing laws, and 2 were codification bills. This year’s secretariat report also notes the number of bills falling into each of the seven official areas of law and identifies several issue areas that the bills focus on.
But the appendix to the secretariat’s report—a list of the bill(s) referred to each special committee that includes only each bill’s title, lead sponsor, and total number of sponsors—has not been posted online along with the report because . . . reasons. *shrug* The appendix would only later be published in the NPCSC Gazette and finally available online usually after a few months’ delay. Finally, at the end of the year, we’d get the special committees’ reports on their deliberations, as explained here in more detail.
Last month’s Gazette issue marks the second stage of disclosure for the 2024 delegate bills. Here are some findings and observations:
The 294 legislative bills, when grouped by the laws they propose to enact, amend, or codify, became 163 legislative projects. A bilingual list is available here.
When ranked by the number of relevant bills, the top 13 projects (because the last four are tied) are shown in the table below. Except for the Historical Cultural Heritage Protection Law, they are also the most-sponsored projects, along with the Huai River Protection Law [淮河保护法], proposed by 226 delegates joining three separate bills.
Among the top 13 projects (by bill count), only the proposed Nurses / Nurse Practitioners Law and changes to the Compulsory Education Law do not yet appear in a legislative plan of the current NPCSC. Similar bills have been introduced yearly since 2018. And based on the NPC Education, Science, Culture, and Public Health Committee’s reports, the NPC is much more likely to enact legislation on nurses in the near future than to lengthen compulsory education (i.e., grades 1–9) to cover preschool, high school, or both—what the delegates have been proposing.
Almost 60% of the legislative bills proposed projects that were already included in the current NPCSC’s legislative plans. This was expected as empirical research shows that key functions of delegate bills include helping implement official legislative plans and shaping the substance of government-sponsored bills. But I was surprised, however, that only 12 bills concerned then-pending legislation, including only two about the revision to the Public Security Administration Punishments Law [治安管理处罚法] that had received a great deal of public attention and criticism.
The bills also proposed 87 legislative projects that had not previously appeared in the current NPCSC’s legislative plans. Some (e.g., a proposed Government Bonds Law [国债法]) may be enacted eventually, while others (e.g., a proposed Law on Protecting the Archives on Cross-Strait Relations [海峡两岸关系档案保护法]) are less likely. We’ll find out what the relevant governmental bodies think about these proposals come December, when the NPC special committees report their deliberations on the bills to the NPCSC.
Sexual Harassment Claims in Chinese Courts
Exercising my editorial prerogative, I’ll end this newsletter with something unrelated to the NPC.
A major domestic news story in China last month was a Renmin University graduate student’s public accusation of sexual harassment against her doctoral supervisor, and the University’s swift firing of the professor the next day (July 22).
Shortly after Renmin University announced its decision, the WeChat account of Anti–Discrimination Law Review [反歧视评论] posted the full text of an article (sans footnotes and complete case excerpts) that my coauthors and I had recently published in the Review, titled “中国法院性骚扰案件研究（2018–2020年）[Research on Sexual Harassment Case in China’s Courts (2018–2020)].” Here is my translation of the abstract:
This Article examines 83 civil cases from 2018–2020 in which the dispute hinged on whether sexual harassment had occurred. Those cases can be divided into three categories based on their causes of action: damages actions for sexual harassment [by survivors against harassers], defamation cases, and labor disputes. Among them, only seven were damages actions for sexual harassment, while the rest were all lawsuits that alleged harassers filed against accusers. And in only 37 cases did the court found that sexual harassment occurred. Accusers also faced various obstacles in court. For instance, they bear the burden of proof in all three types of cases and must prove their claims to “a high degree of likelihood” [高度盖然性]. In addition, courts gave little credence to testimonial evidence [offered by accusers] and unduly relied on the outcomes of police investigations.
My coauthor Darius Longarino also posted a Twitter / X thread on this article with more information. The article expands on an earlier piece we wrote for The Diplomat discussing the same set of cases, and is geared toward a more scholarly Chinese audience. As it is not yet available in any academic database, anyone interested in reading the full version (with footnotes etc.) should feel free to contact me directly.
That’s all for this month’s issue. Thanks for reading!
Here’s our preview of NPC-related events in August 2024. If you wish to get all our coverage in your inbox in real time, subscribe here!
Harry Dai & Chentuo Zhu contributed to this post
The issue was published on April 2 and should’ve been available to anyone with a print subscription soon thereafter. I actually visited the National Library of China in Beijing on July 16 just to check it out (for the list of delegate bills I’m about to discuss), but forgot about this report. A missed opportunity for a scoop!
This number, I should note, is significantly lower than the number of bills introduced in recent NPCs. The annual average was 456 bills during the 13th NPC (2018–22) and 473 bills during the 12th NPC (2013–2017). Although the delegates submitted the fewest bills at each NPC’s inaugural session—which was understandable, as most delegates were freshmen selected just a few months prior, and a bill requires 30 or more signatures—the number of submissions picked up the next year. Yet in year two of the 14th NPC, the number of bills introduced was still about 36% lower than the average from 2013 to 2022, though it did beat the 271 bills submitted in 2023. I don’t have a good explanation for this sharp drop.