Xicheng district makes great strides in promoting rule of law

As part of the core area of China's capital city of Beijing, Xicheng district has been taking steps to promote building of a law-based government in recent years, achieving remarkable progress.

The district's extraordinary effort led to its listing in June as one of China's first demonstration regions for building law-based governments. 

It also became the only district-level region of Beijing to appear in the report of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences that assesses China's progress in promoting rule of law. In particular, it ranked third among China's county-level governments in terms of government transparency, according to the report.

These achievements couldn't have been made without the steps the district has taken to pursue a law-based government.

Independent assessments

To more objectively reflect where it stands in the building of a law-based government, the district government commissioned an authoritative institution to carry out independent assessments in 2017.

Over the following three years, the government actively used the annual assessments to improve its work. One of the results was its drive to unify the registration, numbering and release rules for regulatory documents released by government agencies across the district.

With the help of the independent assessments the government saw rapid improvement. In 2019, it achieved a rate of 95.96 percent in that year's assessment report, the highest score the assessment institution ever given. 

Legal support for epidemic fight

Soon after China began its fight against the COVID-19 outbreak this spring, the district government set up a legal counsel team consisting of legal scholars and lawyers to ensure the legality of major administrative decisions on epidemic control, supervise handling of major cases, and provide legal advice on emergency response.

When work resumption took center stage, legal service teams were established to help enterprises, especially medium, small and micro ones, get their operations back on track.

Commitment to dispute resolution

To resolve social disputes in a more efficient way, the district's committee for overall law-based government called this April for a broad mediation network with people’s mediation as its foundation and administrative, judicial and industry-specific mediation approaches playing a supplementary role.

Throughout 2019, the district mediated 15,116 administrative disputes in total, 81 percent of which were successfully resolved. Its people's mediation organizations handled 6,348 disputes during the period with a success rate of up to 97 percent.

As a result of its successful mediation effort, the district saw a 14.5 percent drop in the number of applications for administrative reconsideration last year.

The district established China's first district-level people's mediators' association in 2006, which has since grown to nearly 10,000 members of a constantly improving professional level.