Breakthroughs in rule of law

Editor's Note: At a recent symposium in Beijing hosted by the China Institute for Reform and Development, experts exchanged views on future reform in China based on the rule of law. The following are some excerpts from their speeches:

Decision-making should be legal

In the communiqué issued by the Fourth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, it was proposed, for the first time, that decision-making procedure should always be in accordance with the law.

Decision-making in China, whether in the planning, executing, or supervising, faces many challenges and problems due to the lack of legalization or the ignoring of the law.

To begin with, the legal examination, which is supposed to be a compulsory prerequisite for an administrative decision, is often deliberately ignored by some local governments. Many proposed plans are implemented without the necessary research and public participation.

For some local governments, familiar and supportive experts are more likely to be hired as consultants, leaving the experts with contrary views sidelined and powerless. Worse, local media coverage may be manipulated to push through a decision.

Besides biased or the untimely and belated collection of feedback in the process of execution, the system for evaluating a decision after it is made is often replaced by general work summaries and debriefings. With the project leaders themselves, or else supervising institutions which enjoy shared interests with them all too often as the evaluator, the resulting assessments are rarely fair or objective.

Therefore, to achieve more scientific decision-making, senior government officials should be deprived of planning power and instead it should be entrusted to qualified supplementary consultants such as the think tanks. Moreover, a lifelong accountability system should be applied, not only to the decision-makers but also those judging the merits of making a particular decision.

In other words, those who abuse their decision-making power, or make fatal mistakes when evaluating the merits of making a decision due to a dereliction of duty, should be held accountable regardless of their position.

Xu Yaotong, a professor of politics at the Chinese Academy of Governance