The Office of the Central Committee for Overall Rule of Law has recently released the Opinions on Launching Demonstration Campaigns for Building the Law-based Government (the "Opinions").
The Opinions state that the first round of evaluation and certification for the building of a law-based government will be commenced in 2019, and such evaluation and certification will be conducted biennially in the future, adding that the evaluation and certification will mainly target governments at the city and county level in the early stage, and then will be expanded to cover departments of the State Council and provincial governments in due time. The Opinions contain a set of indicators with respect to the building of a law-based government, the first yardstick of this kind that will be applicable nationwide. This set of indicators is comprised of eight Class I indicators, 34 Class II indicators, 100 Class III indicators and four additional indicators, covering the lawful and complete fulfillment of government functions, improvement to the system of law-based administrative regimes, efforts to make sure significant administrative decisions are made in a scientific, democratic and lawful manner, among others. The Opinions specially set up two steps, namely "third-party evaluation" and "survey of public satisfaction", in the certification procedures, adding that the exit mechanism will be strictly operated over agencies that commit seriously illegal administrative acts or cause extremely negative social impacts due to their administrative inaction or misconduct, in order to avoid the lifelong certification situation.