A Preliminary Deliberation On The Legislative Power Distribution Between Chinese Central And Local Authorities

As society grows more complicated, the concentration of all governmental powers in asingle central authority has become unrealistic. As a result, legislative power, which bestdemonstrates the principle of popular sovereignty, of has to be divided both horizontallyand vertically. Although scholars from the west seem to be more concerned about horizontalseparation and balance of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, as a country of massivescale, unbalanced regional development, and immature legal systems, China can gain a lotmore from researches done on vertical distribution of legislative power. At the core of thisissue is the distribution and the respective limitations of the central and local legislativeauthority.This dissertation first goes through the current state of central-local legislative powerdistribution. It discerns that local legislative power faces the following limitations. First itcannot enter the realm exclusive for central legislature; second, local legislation cannotconflict with those legislative of an higher authority; third, it faces the De Facto limitationsimposed by the legislative conflict resolution mechanism. After careful analysis, thisdissertation argues that our current division of legislative power among central and localauthorities suffers the following flaws such as ambiguity of relevant legal provisions, a lackof clear standards for determining whether a local legal doctrine has conflicted with lawsmade by higher authorities and so forth.The solving of these problems requires one to do comparative research on the verticaldistribution of legislative powers in other nations This dissertation successfully completedthat after a careful study of how other countries divide their legislative power among centraland local authorities and how nations of different original distribution has graduallyconverged on this matter.Most importantly, this dissertation has come forth with concrete suggestions that maysolve or at least relieve the problems that the current legislative power distribution is having.For example, a politically neutral agency that can provide suggestions to the relevantagencies such as the standing committee of the People’s Congress about whether a locallegislation has trespassed its limitations can be put in place. And the list of items reserved only for central legislative authorities can be narrated again in a more specific way.Meanwhile, this dissertation attempts to explore more about where the driving force that willmake the division of legislative power better and more reasonable come from. Massparticipation and people’s demands for rights realization will prove to be vital in thelegislative system’s reform;and that the involvement of local governments and the CPC canalso affect the process positively.