Full Text: Work report of NPC Standing Committee (11)

The main legislative tasks we plan to accomplish this year include enactment of the Law on Labor Contracts, the Employment Promotion Law, the Social Security Law, the Law on Mediation and Arbitration of Labor Disputes, the Law on Administrative Decrees, the Law on Response to Emergencies, the Antitrust Law, the Law on State-Owned Assets, the Law to Combat Illegal Drugs, the Law to Curb Illegal Activities, the Law on Urban and Rural Planning, and the Circular Economy Law, as well as revision to the Law on Scientific and Technological Progress, the Civil Procedure Law, the Criminal Procedure Law, the Law on Food Hygiene, the Law on Energy Conservation and the Law on Attorneys. All concerned organizations should take into consideration the requirements of the assigned tasks, their responsibilities, time constraints and organization in carrying out these legislative projects, promptly work out ways to address major issues and ensure that bills are submitted for deliberation on schedule. The Standing Committee will strengthen organizational leadership, give full play to the role of the NPC special committees, strictly control legislation quality and ensure smooth progress in legislative work. It will also urge concerned organizations to promptly draw up supporting regulations for existing laws that require them and try to ensure that they are drawn up when bills are being formulated or deliberated so that they can be introduced soon after a bill becomes law. Preparations should be made for the five-year plan for legislation of the next NPC.

Making sure that legislative work is carried out in a scientific and democratic manner is an internal requirement for raising legislation quality, so we must satisfy this requirement throughout the legislation process. In addition to soliciting written opinions on bills, we will conduct special research projects and hold forums and debates to directly solicit your opinions and those from all sectors of society. We will publish the entire texts of bills that have a bearing on the vital interests of the people in order to obtain a wide range of opinions. We will hold debates and hearings to carry out in-depth deliberations for highly technical or controversial bills. We will solicit opinions as extensively as possible so that the laws we enact fully express the common wishes of the people and thus ensure that they can be fully implemented.

China is now in a critical period for reform and development, in which China's economic system and social structure, the interests of different sectors of society and people's thinking and concepts are all changing profoundly. These unprecedented social changes provide very strong vitality for China's development, but they inevitably create a wide variety of conflicts and problems as well. We must always adhere to the correct political orientation, put people first, proceed from China's actual conditions and realities and follow the mass line in legislative work. We must have a good understanding of the objective laws governing reform, opening up and socialist modernization, obtain a deep understanding of the characteristics of the current stage of China's economic and social development, and give due consideration to the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people, the current common interests of the people and the special interests of different groups in society. We need to concentrate on passing legislation urgently needed to solve practical problems in daily life. We need to strike a balance between stability of the law and the need to adapt to changes and make sure that laws are both progressive and practicable so that the law can fully play its proper role in standardizing and guiding the functioning of society and guaranteeing success in building a harmonious socialist society.

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