law was publicized, the NPC Standing Committee received over 10,000 suggestions, and held over 100 seminars and public hearings to collect opinions from different walks of life.

Within the month after the draft law of the Employment Promotion Law was publicized, the NPC Standing Committee received 11,020 suggestions, of which 70 percent came from the grassroots level.

Increasing public participation has been introduced into the planning, drafting and deliberation of laws. An increasing number of law drafts have been publicized to solicit public opinion and a rising amount of public opinion has been heard through channels such as public hearings. Public participation has increasingly become the standard practice for China's legislature.

Fourth, the practice of legislation has increasingly attached importance to respecting rules of social development and legislation, the opinions of scholars and experience of foreign countries in related laws. For example, the recycling economy law, which is under the congress' rectification, has become the role model in this regard.

Fifth, the quality of legislation has progressed considerably. Legal drafts have been publicized to solicit suggestions from experts, lawyers, judges and other stakeholders so that laws reflect the will of the people. Legislative work has fully considered the real situation in China instead of copying procedures and models in Western countries. While drafting and adopting new laws, revising old laws has increasingly become a predominant part of the legislature's work in recent years. Upgrading old laws to ensure their relevance to current society is also in line with the requirement of building a harmonious society through legislation. Over the last five years, revised laws have accounted for 57 percent of legislative projects of the NPC and its standing committee.

Roadmap for the future

From the long-term development of legislation, the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics has taken shape and perfecting this system will be the major task of legislative work in China in the future. The perfection of the system will involve balancing responsibility and power as well as different interests, and the relocation of social resources. The improvement of standards for the legislative procedures, techniques, quality and evaluation indexes is also part of perfecting the system, which will focus on the improvement of the legal system and enhancing the feasibility and efficiency of laws and regulations.

The 11th NPC will carefully review the implementation of the legislative blueprint of the 10th NPC in numbers and quality of laws drafted and revised and issue a legislative blueprint for the next five to 15 years so that legislative work can better guarantee the realization of strategic goals for building a well-off society in an all-around way put forward by the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

From the internal rules of the legislative process, legislative work in China will face challenges in the process of deepening reforms of political systems and legal systems. With the transition from a legislation-centered rule of law development model to a new development model featuring coordination between legislation and implementation of laws, more public participation and scientific approaches will be the main characteristics of future legislative work.

In terms of the structure of the legal system, the legislature will strike a balance between economic law and social law, public law and private law, domestic law and ratification of international treaties. The legislature faces a heavy workload of enacting new laws and revising, supplementing, interpreting and abolishing existing laws in the coming decade.

The author is Director of the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences