1. Berman, Daniel M., A Bill Becomes a Law: Congress Enacts Civil Rights Legislation (Second Edition) (London: MacMillan, 1966), p. vii.Google Scholar

2. This article focuses on the process of lawmaking, and only tangentially discusses the structure and powers of these lawmaking institutions, which I and others have recently discussed in some detail elsewhere. On the post-Mao development of Chinese lawmaking institutions, see Scot Tanner, Murray, “The erosion of Communist Party control over lawmaking in China,” The China Quarterly, No. 138 (June 1994), pp. 381–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Tanner, “Organizations and politics in China's post-Mao law-making system,” in Potter, Pitman B. (ed.), Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994) pp. 56–96Google Scholar; and Tanner, “Building a legislature that counts: bureaucratic and subcommittee development in China's National People's Congress,” paper presented at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Los Angeles, CA. See also O'brien, Kevin J., “Chinese People's Congresses and legislative embeddedness: understanding early legislative development,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (April 1994), pp. 80–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O'Brien, , “Legislative development and Chinese political change,” Studies in Comparative Communism, Vol. XXII, No. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 57–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and O'Brien, , Reform Without Liberalization: China's National People's Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also McCormick, Barrett L., Political Reform in Post-Mao China, Democracy and Bureaucracy in a Leninist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar. The early pathbreaking works are Solinger, Dorothy, “The Fifth NPC and the process of policy-making,” Asian Survey, No. 12 (December 1982), pp. 1238–1275CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoar Foster, Frances, “Codification in post-Mao China,” American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol. XXX, No. 3 (Summer 1982), pp. 413–134.Google Scholar

3. The best of the OPM literature on Chinese politics includes Oksenberg, Michel, “Economic policy-making in China: summer 1981,” The China Quarterly, No. 90 (June 1982), pp. 165–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lieberthal, Kenneth and Oksenberg, Michel, Policy-Making in China: Leaders, Structures, and Processes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Lampton, David M., “Water: challenge to a fragmented political system,” paper presented to the Workshop on Policy Implementation in the Post-Mao Era, Columbus, Ohio, June 1983; Lampton, David M. (ed.), Policy Implementation in Post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Lieberthal, Kenneth G. and Lampton, David M. (eds.), Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).Google Scholar

4. For these organizations, these missions or ideologies define: the organization's role in the system; the problems which the organization considers important; the preferred range of methods for dealing with those problems (as well as certain hostile or “taboo” methods and policies); and the preferred range of methods by which an organization judges its success or failure. On the notion of an organizational mission or ideology, see Simon, Herbert A., “On the concept of organizational goal,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1964), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mohr, Lawrence B., “The concept of organizational goal,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 77, No. 2 (June 1973), pp. 470–481CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967); and Allison, Graham T., Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1971). On organizational missions in the Chinese bureaucracy, see Oksenberg, “Economic policy-making in China.”Google Scholar

5. Central leaders’ power resources include ideology, the military and civilian coercive systems, financial and propaganda apparatuses, various meeting and document systems, personnel management systems (the nomenklatura system), and a variety of overlapping and competing policy implementation networks. Organizational power resources include unequal bureaucratic ranks, and unequal access to bargaining resources such as money, goods, territory, personnel and access to top leaders.

6. As Lieberthal and Oksenberg's studies of major energy projects indicate, this process can be agonizingly slow, often taking decades. Indeed, David Lampton, a leading exponent of the OPM, even argues that immobilism is often so great that a crisis can actually play a constructive role as a consensus-inducing condition. See Lieberthal and Oksenberg, Policy Making in China, esp. chs. 5–7; and Lampton “Water: challenge to a fragmented political system,” p. 17.

7. I am indebted to Pitman B. Potter for this point.

8. This case is made especially well in Kingdon, John W., Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policy (1st ed.) (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1984), esp. pp. 83–89.Google Scholar

9. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy.

10. Schulman, Paul R., “Nonincremental policy making,” American Political Science Review (APSR), No. 69 (December 1975), pp. 1354–1370.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Cohen, Michael, March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., “A garbage can model of organizational choice,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1972), pp. 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. For a discussion of these shifting power balances or moods as “cycles” during the reform era, see Baum, Richard “The road to Tiananmen: Chinese politics in the 1980s,” in Roderick, MacFarquhar (ed.), The Politics of China. 1949–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 340–45.Google Scholar

13. The role of these entrepreneurs is best described in Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy.

14. Cohen, March and Olsen, “Garbage can model,” p. 6.

15. Of course, these process stages are an analytical tool, and are not always that clear in reality. As I will argue later, in the discussion of agenda-setting, inter-agency review and NPC debate, some stages merge into each other, with one beginning before the previous stage has ended.

16. See Carol Lee Hamrin, “The Party Leadership System” and Nina P. Halpern, “Information flows and policy coordination in the Chinese bureaucracy,” in Lieberthal and Lampton, Bureaucracy Politics and Decision Making, pp. 95–124 and 125–150.

17. Such lawmaking generalists would include Peng Zhen, Wan Li, Qiao Shi, Chen Pixian, Peng Chong and Wang Hanbin.

18. A major turning-point in this process was the CCP's March 1991 promulgation of Central Document Number 8, which laid out a relatively non-interventionist set of procedures for Central Party review of lawmaking. See Tanner, “The erosion of Communist Party control.”

19. In addition to the information in Ibid., see Hamrin, “The Party leadership system” and Halpern, “Information flows and policy coordination.”

20. Or, in the past, the now-defunct Economic Legislation Research Centre.

21. “1982–1986 nian jingji lifa guihua (cao'an)” (“1982–86 Economic Legislation Plan (draft)”), in State Council Economic Legislation Research Centre, Jingji fagui yanjiu ziliao(Research Materials on Economic Legislation), personal copy, approximate date early 1983, pp. 3–16.

22. The phrase “competitive persuasion” is Nina P. Halpern's. See “Information flows and policy coordination,” p. 126.

23. Xiaoping, Deng, “Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future,” Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–82) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1983), pp. 157–58.Google Scholar

24. Interview with former Party official, Ann Arbor. Michigan, March 1990.

25. Of course, the high percentage of State Council sponsored legislation also reflects the subject of the plan: economic legislation, traditionally the State Council's bailiwick.

26. This discussion of Yuan Baohua's involvement in the law relies upon interviews conducted with Chinese officials and legal scholars in 1989, and the following published sources: He, Lian, “‘Qiye fa’ qianqian houhou” (“The whole story about “The Enterprise Law’”), Xiandai qiye daokan (Beijing), No. 4 (1988), pp. 5–10Google Scholar; Mu, Lu, “Shinian yunyu, hunxi san ‘fen.’ ‘Qiye fa’ dansheng ji’ (“After ten year's gestation, its spirit rests on three ‘divisions.’ A record of the birth of the ‘Enterprise Law’ ”), Renmin ribao, 14 April 1988, p. 4Google Scholar; Sutang, Zhang and He Ping, , “Gaige huhanzhe qiyefa jinkuai chutai” (“Reform cries out for the immediate emergence of the Enterprise Law”), Liaowang, No. 5 (1988), pp. 4–7.Google Scholar

27. Judy Polumbaum, ‘To protect or restrict? Points of contention in China's draft press law,” in Potter, Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China, pp. 247–269.

28. On the debate over the State Secrets Law, see China Daily, 12 January 1988, p. 1; Beijing Xinhua English Service (BXE) 15 January 1988 in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, China: Daily Report (FBIS-CHI), 19 January 1988, p. 16Google Scholar; Beijing Xinhua Domestic Service (BXDS) 15 January 1988 in FBIS-CHI, 22 January 1988, pp. 8–9Google Scholar; China Daily, 2 September 1988, p. 3; and “‘Baomi fa’ jin qi shishi” (“ ‘Secrets Protection Law’ takes effect today”), Renmin ribao, 1 May 1989, p. 2. On the 1989 Public Demonstrations Law, see Polumbaum, Judy, “In the name of stability: restrictions on the right of assembly in the People's Republic of China,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 36 (July 1991), pp. 43–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Liu, Chunhe (ed.), Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo jihui youxing shiwei fa jiangjie (An Explanation of the Meetings and Public Demonstrations Law of the People's Republic of China) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1990), esp. pp. 93–105.Google Scholar

29. These examples of Cao Siyuan's repackaging of proposals are drawn from interviews with Chinese scholars and officials, as well as the following and many other books and articles by Cao: Zhongguo qiye pochanfa zhinan (A Primer on China's Enterprise Bankruptcy Law) (Beijing: Jingji chubanshe, 1988); “Zai jingzheng zhong fahui baoxian gongsi zuoyong de shexiang” (“An idea for giving full play to the role of insurance companies in competition”), Caiyi jingji (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan gongye jingji yanjiusuo), No. 5 (1980) pp. V47-V49; “Shixing pochan fa, zhengqu gao xiaoyi: guanyu ‘qiye pochan zhengdun fa’ de fangan shexiang” (“Carry out the bankruptcy law, strive for high efficiency: an idea concerning the matter of an ‘Enterprise Bankruptcy Consolidation Law’ ”), Jishu jingji yanjiu ziliao (State Council Technical Economic Research Centre), No. 9 (September 1983), General No. 125, pp. 1–12; ”Zengqiang qiye huoli de falu cuoshi” (“Legal measures for increasing the vitality of enterprises”), Minzhu yufazhi (Beijing: PRC Ministry of Justice), November 1984, pp. 7–11.1 have analysed Cao's entrepreneurial activities in some detail in ”The politics of the lawmaking process in post-Mao China: lessons from the 1986 Enterprise Bankruptcy Law,” paper presented at the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, D.C.

30. Cao Siyuan, “Zai jingzheng zhong fahui baoxian gongsi zuoyong de shexiang.”

31. Interview 29–29–16–28/XHB, Beijing, March 1989.

32. Ibid. The report is contained in State Council Technical Economic Research Centre, ”Suggestions on several problems concerning the struggle for technological progress to spur economic development,” 1983. The text of the report, seen by the author, is virtually identical to the description contained in Cao Siyuan, Zhongguo qiye pochanfa zhinan, p. 53.

33. Interview 29–29–16–28/XHB, Beijing, March 1989; also ”Sitong shehui fazhan yanjiusuo suozhang Cao Siyuan jianli” (“Resume of Cao Siyuan, Director of the Sitong Corporation [a.k.a. ”Stone Corporation” ] Social Development Research Institute”) (Beijing: Sitong Corporation, November 1988). This source lists no fewer than 88 articles and major interviews by Cao alone promoting bankruptcy during 1980–89.

34. This last justification, certainly intended to curry favour with Peng, is prominently stressed in the official drafting proposal submitted by delegate Wen Yuankai to the NPC Standing Committee; “Guanyu zhiding ‘qiye pochan zhengdun fa’ de ti'an” (“Proposal for drafting a ‘Bankruptcy Consolidation Law’ ”), NPC Standing Committee document dated 17 May 1984.

35. On the history of enterprise management policy, see Andors, Stephen, China's Industrial Revolution: Politics, Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar; also Donnithorne, Audrey, China's Economic System (New York: Praeger, 1967)Google Scholar; and To, Lee Lai, Trade Unions in China 1949 to the Present (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

36. Leadership intervention also appears to be important to such innovative departures. At several key junctures in drafting the Bankruptcy Law, when the law appeared to be stalled, the logjam was only broken by the strong intervention of Central leaders (notably Zhao Ziyang), or by a major swing in the balance of leadership politics, as occurred after the passage of the October 1984 Decision on Restructuring the Economic System.

37. I am indebted to Pitman B. Potter for his suggestions on this issue.

38. Pitman B. Potter, ‘The Administrative Litigation Law of the PRC: judical review and bureaucratic reform,” in Potter, Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China, esp. pp. 270–71, 274–75.

39. In the early stages of drafting the Bankruptcy Law, for example, several organizations, including the Ministries of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, Light Industry, and Public Security, and the People's Liberation Army, were extremely concerned lest the law subject some of their less efficient factories to closure. A confidential report on the law as it was submitted to the State Council indicated that exemptions woyld be granted to the notoriously unprofitable PLA “Third Line” industries and to Public Security firearms factories, which had limited, sporadic, and hence unprofitable product runs.

40. Interview with Chinese financial official, 1987.

41. On policy-making in the late Mao era, see Lieberthal, Kenneth, with Tong, James and Yeung, Sai-Cheung, Central Documents and Politburo Politics in China, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, No. 33 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. I have reviewed the nature of the changes in the draft Bankruptcy and State Enterprise Laws in some detail in The Politics of Lawmaking in Post-Mao China, Ph.D. dissertation, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms Inc., 1991).

43. Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works, pp. 157–58.

44. See Lu Mu, , “Shinian yunyu, hunxi san ‘fen.’ ‘Qiye fa’ dansheng ji”; Lian He, ” ‘Qiye fa’ qianqian houhou’ (“The whole story about ‘Enterprise Law’”), Xiandai qiye daokan (Beijing), No. 4 (1988), p. 6Google Scholar; also interview 12–32–17/34–19–28/ABE, Beijing, April 1989; interview 27–22–13–33/TSE, Beijing, 29 March 1989.

45. Sutang, Zhang and Ping, He, “The light boat has swiftly passed through the mountains - looking back at the Seventh National People's Congress,” BXDS, 8 March 1993 in FBIS-CHI, 9 March, 1993, pp. 14–17.Google Scholar

46. Tanner, “The erosion of Central Party control over lawmaking.”

47. Interview 26–17–13–33/TWS, Beijing, August 1992.

48. Ibid.

49. Lian He, “Qiye fa qianqian houhou,” strongly suggests this interpretation of the “hostage” relationship between the Bankruptcy and Enterprise Laws. Several Chinese legislative scholars and officials have also confirmed that the NPC tactic was understood in this way.

50. I am indebted to a recent Beijing University law graduate, Yao Yixin, for the phrase “legislative perfectionism” and for introducing me to Chinese materials which complain of the problem.

51. Interviewee 27–22–13–33/TSE, Beijing, 29 March 1989, an official who was involved in drafting the Enterprise Law, indicates that the trade unions and the CCP Organization Department, which had temporarily dropped their efforts to insert protections for Party and union officials in the bill, became heartened and revived their efforts with a vengeance after seeing the strength of the spring 1985 NPC opposition.

52. I am indebted to Stanley Lubman for this point and this apt phrase.

53. William C. Jones, “The significance of the opinion of the Supreme People's Court for Civil Law in China,” in Potter, Domestic Law Reforms in Post-Mao China, pp. 97–108.

54. The Court has in recent years shown more assertiveness and independence in explicating the law than in adjudicating cases based on the law. This appears to reflect the influence of Soviet training on many of its judges and staff. I am indebted to Whitmore Gray

55. “Zhuajin lifa gongzuo, jiaqiang falu jiandu” (“Grasp firmly legislative work, strengthen legal oversight”), Fazhi ribao, 22 March 1989, p. 3.

56. Interview with Supreme People's Court staffer, May 1989.