3. We actively worked to make legislation more scientific and democratic. Adhering to the mass line, giving full play to democracy and expanding the orderly participation of citizens in legislative work is an important way of ensuring good legislative work and improving the quality of legislation. The Standing Committee of the Tenth NPC, in the spirit of reform and innovation, actively worked to find effective ways to realize scientific and democratic legislation.
First, we released the full texts of the draft bills for the Law on Property Rights, the Labor Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law and the revised Law on the Prevention and Control of Water Pollution to the public to gather opinions from a wide swath of the general public, especially ordinary people.
Second, for the first time in history we staged a public hearing on legislation for the NPC and its Standing Committee to directly listen to the opinions of the general public and concerned parties concerning the salary threshold for the individual income tax to help us revise the Individual Income Tax Law.
Third, the draft laws submitted for deliberation were printed and sent to concerned organs of the CPC Central Committee and the central government, local governments and organizations and various forms of conferences were convened to solicit opinions. For especially technical issues in draft laws, we held meetings of experts to discuss those issues.
Fourth, before deliberating important legislation such as the Law on Property Rights and Law on Corporate Income Tax at NPC sessions, we assembled the deputies to read and discuss them to carefully listen to their opinions so we could revise and improve the drafts.
Fifth, we diligently deliberated draft laws numerous times. For draft laws that affected many interests and that drew strong opposing opinions, we adopted an active but cautious approach, conducting thorough surveys and studies for areas that required such treatment, patiently negotiating areas that needed to be negotiated and fully discussing areas that needed to be discussed so we could repeatedly deliberate, revise and improve such laws and reach a basic consensus of opinion before actually voting on them. The drafts for the Law on Oversight, the Administrative Approval Law, the Labor Contract Law and the Law on Citizen Identity Cards were deliberated four times before they were passed. The draft of the Law on Property Rights was deliberated eight times, which is unprecedented in the legislative history of China.