Jiangxi adopts multiple measures in advancing law popularization work

In their effort to lay a solid foundation for the building of the rule of law in Jiangxi province, local judicial administrative authorities have taken a variety of measures in recent years to make law popularization more productive.

Bringing the Constitution closer to people

To raise the popularity of China's Constitution among people, officials from more than 30 local judicial and administrative authorities in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi, gathered in the city's rule of law-themed park on Dec 3, 2018 to mark the opening of national Constitution Week publicity campaign as well as the first open day of Jiangxi's Department of Justice and Nanchang's Bureau of Justice.

During the event, these authorities provided citizens with such services as law popularization and legal consulting.

"We must make the best of the national constitution publicity week to publicize the Constitution and educate people about it across the province," said Wang Guoqiang, head of Jiangxi's Department of Justice. 

Wang said their aim is to make "the Constitution 'come alive' and enter people's daily lives.”

In fact, Jiangxi has been gearing up its effort to popularize the Constitution since March, 2018 when the provincial government issued an official document and decided to launch province-wide Constitution publicity campaigns.

One month later, a knowledge contest about the Constitution was rolled out both online and offline, attracting up to 817,000 netizens within a month.

Over the past two year, Jiangxi has held at least 1,500 events to publicize the Constitution, distributed 500,000 Constitution-related books, and supplied more than 200,000 posters themed on it.

Involving more authorities 

Recently, the market regulation authority of Yingtan, a city in Jiangxi, launched a massive law popularization campaign during its handling of a case involving false product advertising by an unlicensed health food producer. 

During the campaign, the authority reminded the elderly of the traps in the sale of health food products and enhanced the publicity of health food-related laws and regulations.

The campaign epitomized the province's broader effort to introduce more agencies to law popularization, which is based on the principle that "the one who enforces the law shall be responsible for popularizing it".

Under the doctrine, the work of law popularization is divided into 51 specific tasks and assigned to 56 government agencies. 

What's more, the performance of these agencies in accomplishing those tasks is also included in their performance evaluation indicator system. 

 "Now, Jiangxi has entirely changed the situation where the responsibility for the law popularization was solely borne by the judicial administrative agency," said Chen Huanhuan, head of the law popularization division of the Justice Department of Jiangxi.

Integrating the culture of rule of law into people's lives 

A village in the city of Fengcheng used to be a troublesome place due to its poor public security conditions. 

With the introduction of the culture of rule of law, the village has now been transformed into a rule of law-themed park with improved public security and a dramatic increase in good deeds. 

As a result, no criminal case or violation of public security laws has taken place so far this year, which, in turn, remarkably raised local people's sense of happiness.

The positive change in the village epitomizes Jiangxi's effort to cultivate the culture of rule of law across the province.

Since the release of its three-year plan for building a rule of law culture in May 2017, Jiangxi has, so far, built 69 rule of law-themed parks, 217 rule of law-themed plazas and 68 rule of law-themed communities in addition to thousands of other rule of law-themed public facilities.

Cultivating grassroots legal pundits

To more effectively carry out law popularization in rural areas, the provincial government of Jiangxi rolled out a three-year plan for cultivating grassroots legal pundits (villagers with adequate legal knowledge) for each village of the province in 2018.

At present, roughly 2.53 million certified legal pundits are working in rural Jiangxi and playing an important role in law popularization and dispute mediation.

Jiangxi's practice of cultivating grassroots legal pundits has now become a national policy after China's central government adopted it and demanded its generalization across the country in June.

Huang Shousun (second from the right), a grassroots legal pundit, shares his experience with others. (Photo/Legal Daily)