The Chinese Local Legislative Power

The establishment of local legislative power is an important way to give full play to the local initiatives and integrate the uniformity of central legislative power with the locality of local legislative power with the premise of uniformity of legal system.The municipalities with districts are entitled to exercise local legislative power in the amendment of “Legislative Law of PRC”. Although it has a significant influence on the modernization and localization of local administration system to some extent, it put forwards new requirements for the practice of local legislative power. This paper points out that Chinese local legislative competence must be in conformity with the specific national condition and try to draw a clear line between central legislative items and local legislative items under the condition of respecting local autonomy after making a comparison between federal states and unitary states in the legislative competence and learning the experience of the legislative power in different countries.Besides, this paper analyses the problems in the practice of local legislative power including local protectionism, legislative formalism benign violation of the Constitution and legislation of poor quality and etc by defining the local and central legislative competences and referring to the theory on relation between central legislation and local legislation. The problems above are mainly caused by an undefined division between central legislative competence and local legislative competence and uneven distribution of local legislative resources. Therefore, in order to exercise the local legislative power in a right way, it is necessary to know and make a definite division the relation between central legislation and local legislation insisting on the leadership of the Communist Party of China and dominance of Chinese National People's Congress as well as the system of filing and examination of People's Congress at all levels.