2. Work was completed on important legislation bearing on overall economic and social development, the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law and the revised Law on Compulsory Education were promulgated and implemented, and the draft Law on Corporate Income Tax has been submitted to this session for your deliberation and approval. Formulating the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law to set up a legal framework for orderly closing down enterprises so that enterprises that perform well can thrive and enterprises that don't can fall by the wayside was an objective requirement for the development of the socialist market economy. The Standing Committee placed great importance on formulating and passing a law on enterprise bankruptcies. It formulated a law on the bankruptcy of state-owned enterprises in 1986, but it was always difficult to implement due to failure to solve the problem of funding to take care of the employees of bankrupted enterprises. The old law on enterprise bankruptcy could no longer meet practical needs as the socialist market economy developed, the reform of state-owned enterprises was deepened and the non-public sector of the economy developed. We urgently needed to formulate a new bankruptcy law that would apply to all enterprises and would be strongly operational. On the basis of a careful review of the legislative work of the past two Standing Committees, the current Standing Committee conducted thorough surveys and studies, widely solicited opinions, once again formulated the draft Enterprise Bankruptcy Law and finally passed it after deliberating it three times. The Enterprise Bankruptcy Law contains special provisions to require giving priority to paying unpaid wages and contributions for social security due from bankrupt enterprises, and also contains provisions to standardize enterprise bankruptcy procedures and protect the legitimate rights of enterprise employees.

Children are the future of the motherland and the hope of the people. Their healthy development is not only of the greatest concern for hundreds of millions of families but is also a basic guarantee for continued burgeoning progress in China's socialist modernization. The Standing Committee completely revised the Law on Compulsory Education and the Law on the Protection of Minors to address serious problems in compulsory education and the protection of minors.

In revising the Law on Compulsory Education, we mainly clarified three areas:

First, we established the legal framework for a mechanism to ensure funding for compulsory education, made it clear that students will no longer be charged for tuition and miscellaneous fees for compulsory education, and left it to the State Council to determine the steps to implement these provisions.

Second, we set out the requirement that development of compulsory education should make the distribution of compulsory education more uniform and that governments at all levels must appropriately distribute education resources.

Third, we incorporated the requirement for competence-oriented education into the law and further clarified the principles and goals for compulsory education.

The revised Law on Compulsory Education more fully embodies the principle of fairness in education, which is of major significance for ensuring the sound development of compulsory education in China.

The revised Law on the Protection of Minors further clarifies the responsibility of families, schools, society and the state in the protection of minors and highlights the right of minors to receive an education, and it will play a major role in ensuring the physical and mental health of minors and protecting their legitimate rights.

Since the policy of reform and opening up was first instituted, farmers have founded hundreds of thousands of specialized cooperative economic organizations, but their legal status has never been clear. The Standing Committee formulated the Law on Specialized Farmer Cooperatives based on extensive surveys and studies, for the first time confirming in a law their status in the market and standardizing their property system and means of distribution. This has great significance for upholding and improving the basic rural operating system, improving the degree of organization among farmers and promoting industrialization of agriculture. (More)