Yang Zhibo, vice-president of the Islamic Association of China, said he expected the new regulations to curb religious extremism and increase legal consciousness among believers.

They will also impose greater requirements on government officials to protect the legal interests of religious groups, he said.

"The regulations will offer better protection for the interests of Muslims in China, and will also impose higher requirements on them to obey the law and regulations," said Yang, whose association has been consulted on the draft.

In November 2014, the legislature in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region issued the first regional regulation on religious affairs targeting extremism.

The State Administration for Religious Affairs began the process of amending the national regulations last year, as announced by Yu Zhengsheng, chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, during a panel discussion last March.

One change that some experts have called for is the granting of legal person status to religious venues, enabling them to open banks accounts and receive better legal supervision.

Feng Yujun, director of the law and religions research center at the Renmin University of China, said that such status was key to protecting the rights of religious groups and their ownership of property.

"This revision of the regulations would be a good opportunity to make clear property ownership under religious groups," he wrote in a column in China Ethnic News in November.

But Liu Peng, a senior research fellow at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said legislation is a more suitable alternative to a regulation issued by SARA.

"The rule of law must cover religion as well," he said.

"A regulation on religion issued by a central government department means that no court may not accept religious cases when a dispute arises. Then the parties involved can only resort to the religious authorities to solve their disputes, but what if a dispute arises between a religious group and a local religious authority?"