Year in Review: The NPC and the Observer in 2024
Stats and highlights of the past year
Welcome to a special issue of NPC Observer Monthly, a (mostly) monthly newsletter about China’s national legislature: the National People’s Congress (NPC) and its Standing Committee (NPCSC).
Today, I’m cross-posting our year-end review for 2024. If you’d like to avoid receiving duplicative emails, head over to the settings for this newsletter and deselect “NPC Observer Crossposts.“
In 2024, this newsletter crossed the milestone of 1,000 subscribers. My sincerest gratitude to all who read along!
Happy New Year! 🎉 —Changhao
As we bid farewell to 2024, we reflect on the work of the National People’s Congress and of this publication over the past year.
The NPC in 2024
The National People’s Congress (NPC) reached an important milestone in 2024: it turned 70 on September 15. The Communist Party marked the anniversary with great fanfare, holding a grand ceremony in the Great Hall of the People where Xi Jinping delivered a lengthy—but substantively unremarkable—speech. That celebration, as it turns out, was not the most noteworthy event of the year. Earlier that month, the NPCSC suddenly adopted legislation to gradually raise China’s retirement ages for the first time since 1958; that law takes effect tomorrow. Then, in early November, with the whole world watching, the NPCSC approved an RMB 6 trillion debt-swap plan (though it was not quite the stimulus package that many had hoped for). The legislature held press conferences on both bills after they passed—a practice it has largely discontinued since 2020—underscoring their importance. Beyond the headlines, legislation continued at a steady pace, in keeping with the higher legislative output over the last five years or so, as the statistics below show.
In 2024, the 14th NPCSC held six sessions, including two that were postponed to, respectively, September and November—months when it typically does not meet. All in all, the NPCSC was in session for 21.5 days. In March, the 14th NPC met for its second (week-long) session, where it approved an overhaul of the State Council’s organic statute. Altogether, the NPC and its Standing Committee enacted 6 new laws, approved major changes to 13, and adopted 3 quasi-legislative decisions. An additional 14 bills are pending as of today. For details, please see the lists at the end of this section.
Besides the several events noted at the top—the NPC’s 70th anniversary, retirement-age legislation, and debt-swap plan—here are a few additional highlights of the NPC’s work in 2024:
Constitutional enforcement report: In February, the legislature released its first report on efforts “to strengthen and innovate constitutional enforcement.” The report details its activities to enforce the Constitution in 2023 in each of the following five categories: legislation; personal and organizational actions; constitutional review and interpretation; oversight; and propaganda and theoretical research.
Relatedly, the Party decided at the Third Plenum in July to “establish a system for reporting on constitutional enforcement.” This could mean that, as we speculated, “such reports would become regular (likely annual) and more formal”—that is, submitted to the NPCSC for review.
Recording and review (R&R): R&R is the NPCSC’s process of resolving impermissible conflicts within China’s hierarchy of legal norms and serves as the procedural vehicle for constitutional review. Last week, the NPCSC heard its Legislative Affairs Commission’s eighth annual report on R&R. Among the handful of cases disclosed by the report, two received a lot of attention. In the first—which we covered here—the Commission concluded that some of the harsher collateral sanctions imposed on people with criminal convictions likely violated certain constitutionally protected social rights. In the other case, the Commission rejected a controversial provision in a Supreme People’s Court interpretation that directed lower courts to retroactively apply a new provision in the recently revised Company Law [公司法] concerning equity transfers. Two days after the Commission reported to the NPCSC, the Court issued a new interpretation walking back from its prior position.
Relatedly, in March, the Legislative Affairs Commission advised the Hong Kong government on the definition of “Central Authorities” [中央] in the city’s homegrown national security law. Because Hong Kong’s local legislation is subject to NPCSC review under an R&R-like process under the Hong Kong Basic Law, we speculated then that “[t]his mechanism might have prompted the Hong Kong government to proceed with an abundance of caution and seek the Legislative Affairs Commission’s view during drafting.” The Commission’s latest R&R report confirmed our theory, explaining: “The R&R system can help the special administrative regions, during the formulation of the relevant laws, deepen research and deliberation on the relevant matters involving the Central Authorities and the constitutional issues in such laws.” “When necessary, they may submit legal inquiries” to the Commission, the report continues, and then gives Hong Kong’s earlier inquiry as an example.
Shelving bills: In June, the NPCSC took the rare step of permanently shelving two bills—a draft Compulsory Civil Enforcement Law [民事强制执行法] and a draft decision authorizing the State Council to pilot certain reforms of rural residential land—invoking the lesser-known “termination of deliberations” [终止审议] procedure under the 2000 Legislation Law [立法法]. Previously, that procedure had been used only four times. As we explained, shelving the bills was necessary because the Party has yet to clarify the direction of the relevant reforms.
Government debt oversight: After over a year’s preparation, in September, the NPCSC heard the State Council’s first annual report on the management of government debt. This move was consistent with recent reforms to strengthen the NPCSC’s oversight by (among other things) requiring the State Council to submit additional annual reports on important subject matters. If nothing else, the report at least offers an official account of government debt at both central and local levels.
Relatedly, in November, the NPCSC codified the reporting requirement in the Law on Oversight by the Standing Committees of People’s Congresses [各级人民代表大会常务委员会监督法]. The amendment also applied an analogous requirement to local governments from the county level and up.
Codifying the Party’s leadership. In all major legislation passed in 2024 (see lists below), the legislature inserted a provision (if none already existed) requiring the relevant entities or the relevant governmental efforts “to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China,” or something close to it. (The revised Anti–Money Laundering Law [反洗钱法] and the Value-Added Tax Law [增值税法] require the relevant work to “implement the Party’s . . . lines, principles, policies, decisions, and plans.”) As this Bloomberg News report shows, such practice reflects a larger trend since 2018. Laws that feature such a clause—last year’s bills, for example—generally concern state organs and their operations, national security, national defense, or other matters core to the Party’s interest (e.g., ideology).
[The following lists are omitted to limit the length of this email. Check out the original version here.]
New laws passed in 2024 . . .
Revisions & major amendments passed in 2024 . . .
Legislative bills pending by the end of 2024 . . .
Quasi-legislative decisions passed in 2024 . . .
NPC Observer in 2024
In 2024, here on our main site, we published 36 posts and received about 142,000 pageviews—a roughly 13% increase over 2023 and our best year to date—by almost 67,000 visitors from 183 jurisdictions worldwide. Readers from the United States (based on recorded IP addresses) again contributed the most traffic, followed by those from Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and mainland China. As X (formerly Twitter) has become practically unusable, we (most of our tweets at least) have migrated to Bluesky and hope you will join us over there in the new year.
Our most viewed post last year (not counting email opens) was our report on the agenda and daily schedule of the 2024 NPC session, followed by our preview of the NPCSC’s November session (where it approved the debt-swap plan mentioned above). The Civil Code [民法典] page was the most viewed bill page™️ in 2024, followed by those for the Law on Guarding State Secrets [保守国家秘密法], State Council Organic Law [国务院组织法], and Company Law [公司法].
Last year was our first full year of publishing the NPC Observer Monthly newsletter on Substack. In addition to twelve monthly recaps, we published two special issues that analyzed the State Council’s updated R&R regulations and translated the finance minister’s explanation of the debt-swap plan. And our regular recaps have offered (less polished) coverage of additional issues and developments, including NPC special committees’ reports on 2023 delegate bills, NPC delegates’ 2024 legislative proposals, two batches of R&R guiding cases, and highlights of the late NPCSC Chairman Wu Bangguo’s tenure. If those sound interesting to you, consider subscribing to the newsletter today.
Finally, we implemented some important changes to our main site in 2024. Aesthetically, we adopted new fonts and adjusted the site’s line spacing, so that reading is (hopefully) a more pleasant experience. This also serves as a reminder to email subscribers that you should consider reading new posts directly on our site for the full experience. In addition, we took pains to update two of our key resource pages that collect, respectively, the NPCSC’s work priorities and work plans. We are glad to announce that each of the following NPCSC documents is now available in both text-searchable and citable versions (the latter includes the document’s original pagination and publication information), which may exist as a single file:
annual work priorities since 2008;
all annual legislative work plans (2008–);
all annual oversight work plans (2007–); and
all annual delegates-related work plans (2020–).
These include some documents that were published only in expensive NPC Yearbooks [全国人民代表大会年鉴] that are not readily available to the public, such as the NPCSC’s 2019 legislative and oversight work plans. We hope that someone somewhere will benefit from these free resources in their studies or work.
That concludes our programming in 2024. Best wishes to everyone in 2025.
Happy New Year!
Epic work. Your depth of knowledge in the organization and operation of the NPC in unmatched. Truly appreciate your analysis and sharing them. Happy new year.
The problematic SPC interpretation is a curious case, because one section of the Legislative Affairs Commission would have reviewed the draft. However, few know this and with the big fuss about retrospective application, the SPC had to take the fall.