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Details of the eighth round of State Council reorganization in the “Reform and Opening up” era were revealed to the delegates attending the ongoing 1st Session of the 13th NPC on Tuesday. Previous rounds took place in 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, and 2013. In this post, we present our own summary of the 2018 State Council Institutional Reform Plan (?????????), along with information that we think would help our readers better understand the Plan. The NPC is scheduled to approve the Plan on Saturday (March 17). If the final version differs from that released on Tuesday, we will then accordingly update this post.
Types of State Council Bodies
There are seven types of organizations under the State Council:
- Departments constituting the State Council (???????): These are the cabinet-level ministries (?), commissions (???), the People’s Bank of China, and the National Audit Office. For purposes of this post, we include the State Council’s General Office in this category even though it is usually treated separately in practice. Reorganization of these bodies requires the NPC’s approval.
- Organizations directly under the State Council (???????): These organizations can independently perform administrative functions and do not have any parent organization.
- Special organization directly under the State Council (?????????): Currently there is only one such organization, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (???????????).
- Administrative offices under the State Council (???????): These offices assist the Premier with specific matters and have no independent administrative functions.
- Public institutions directly under the State Council (?????????): These institutions are not administrative bodies per se, but some perform administrative functions as authorized by the State Council (the China Securities Regulatory Commission, for example).
- Administrations and bureaus under the departments constituting the State Council (????????????????): They perform administrative functions and each report to (but are technically separate from) one of the departments constituting the State Council.
- Deliberation and coordination agencies under the State Council (?????????): As their name implies, these agencies each coordinate different administrative bodies under the State Council on a particular subject. Given the multitude of these agencies, we only list ones that are relevant to the Plan in the document below.
Changes to bodies in categories #2–7 do not require the NPC’s approval, though customarily they are also reported to the NPC.
Summary of the Plan
For existing State Council bodies, we used the official translations of their names in our summary. For new bodies created by the Plan, we mostly followed the translations published by Xinhua. We only included the Chinese names of new bodies. To limit the length of the document and for formatting purposes, the use of acronyms is inevitable even though we have tried to minimize their use. If you encounter an acronym you do not recognize, please perform a search within the document. We sincerely welcome any and all suggestions and comments on how to improve this summary. Download PDF in U.S.-letter size or A4 size.
Known errors: The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs will also absorb most of the current Ministry of Agriculture’s functions. The document will be updated shortly.
Source: https://npcobserver.com/2018/03/14/a-guide-to-2018-state-council-institutional-reforms/
