Wan Xiongxin: A role model in administrative law enforcement from Gansu

For almost thirty years, since 1990, Wan Xiongxin, deputy investigator of the legislative affairs office of the government of Baiyin, a city in Northwest China's Gansu province, has been handling the city's administrative law enforcement work, making it part of his life and linking together pre-event, in-process and post-event supervision.

As a veteran in this field, Wan has written a series of manuals on how to carry out the work under the law for the local government, and helped Baiyin become a pilot in Gansu to implement an accountability system for administrative law enforcement in 1995.

As a member of a work assessment group set up by the provincial government, Wan participated in the assessment of the law-based administration work in several cities, counties and agencies directly under the provincial government, having all of his proposals accepted by those authorities. As a result, a number of their officials have kept in touch with him to discuss administrative law enforcement issues.

He also takes part in an annual examination of the law-based administration work within the jurisdiction of the municipal government, propelling the building of Baiyin's law-based administration and law-based government.

As a legal advisor for district- and county-level governments in Baiyin, Wan has helped them deal with many thorny issues.

For example, two years ago, faced with the a backlash against a shanty-town rebuilding project to be carried out in a residential quarter in Baiyin, some of the officials responsible for the work came up with a plan for forced building demolition. 

Wan questioned the feasibility of the plan, pointing out that on the one hand, without the release of an announcement about the compensation, the plan would violate a national regulation on the compensation for building expropriation; on the other hand, as many as three-fourths of the residents were still resisting the project. As a result, the plan was canceled.

Wan also participated in training of the city's administrative law enforcers and earned a respectful title “Teacher Wan” for his vast knowledge of and experience in the work.

Wan is familiar not only with general laws but also with the ones on specific lines of work as well. For example, one day, officials from the local water authority brought up five questions in a row at his office. He accurately answered the questions by reciting the most relevant provisions of up to six different laws and regulations. As it turned out, his recitations were one hundred percent accurate.

In 2003, when two agencies of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress started to solicit opinions from grassroots authorities on the draft of China’s administrative licensing law, Wan, based on the local practice, put forward ten proposals, in which he elaborated on which provisions should be revised and why and how. Most of his proposals were adopted.

In 2018, in a lecture on how to correctly execute the power of administrative law enforcement, Wan, drawing on his 30-years of experience, excellently illustrated general laws and industry-specific laws in 36 real cases.