China is set to launch a new round of legislation to approve or amend a sweeping array of economic laws in the next few years to ensure the smooth operation of a market economy.

The legal shake-up is believed to be a major effort by the top Chinese leadership led by President Hu Jintao to further deepen the country's economic reform.

Sources said the legislation plan will be unveiled at the Third Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which is scheduled to be held next month in Beijing.

The proposed passage and amendments of a raft of laws will then be included in a five-year legislation blueprint for the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature.

The Standing Committee of the 10th NPC, elected in March for a five-year term, is expected to publish a full list of the proposed laws in October.

Wang Peiying, an official with the Secretariat of the NPC Standing Committee, was quoted by the 21st Century Business Herald as saying the legislative move aims to "set up a socialist legal system with Chinese characteristic by 2010".

"The legal system will consist of about 170 basic laws and more than 130 laws have so far been enacted," Wang said.

"That means another 30 to 40 new laws need to be legislated."

Meanwhile, he noted, a number of outdated laws will be amended to better cater to the needs of the market economy.

The official revealed that a majority of the proposed laws and amendments are civil, commercial and economic laws.

Feng Lixia, associate professor at the Central Party School, said the current round of legislation followed the other two in the late 1970s and the early 1990s.

In the late 1970s, when the country ended a 10-year "cultural revolution" (1966-76) characterized by legal chaos and began to initiate the reform and opening-up bid, a range of laws were passed and amended.

They included the Constitution, Criminal Law, Marriage Law, Civil Law, Criminal Proceeding Law and Civil Proceedings Law.

In the early 1990s, when China underwent a shift from a planned economy to a market system, it enacted new bills such as the Company Law, Commercial-Banking Law, Securities Law, Labour-Contract Law and People's Bank of China Law.

These laws were considered crucial to China's economic transformation and the establishment of its modern corporate, financial and securities systems.

Feng said the laws to be passed or amended in the next round of legislation are mainly meant to help the country meet the challenges posed by its admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

As China is obliged to open wider to overseas investors in line with its WTO commitment, some new laws are badly needed to deregulate some industries monopolized by State-owned enterprises and enhance government transparency.

As a fresh sign of China's legislative efforts, the latest session of the NPC Standing Committee approved the Administrative Licensing Law in a bid to effectively curb government corruption.

Experts familiar with the NPC legislation plan said the 10th NPC will scrutinize about 61 draft bills in the next five years.

Among them there may be new laws such as Bankruptcy Law, Anti-Dumping Law, Anti-monopoly Law, Anti-subsidies Law, Telecommunications Law, State-Asset Management Law and Taxation Law.

The possible amendments include Company Law, Land-Management Law, Foreign-Trade Law, Budget Law, Securities Law, Commercial-Banking Law and Labour-Contract Law.

While widely hailing the legislative programme as necessary, legal experts urged better co-ordination among the laws to facilitate their implementation.

Jurist Jiang Ping said many of the existing laws were originally drafted by various ministries and then submitted to the NPC for approval, resulting in contradictory regulations.

(China Daily September 3, 2003)