The Chinese central government has unveiled plans to draft a slew of new legislation across a range of key areas, including anti-trust law and tech innovation, as well as the increased application of new technologies such as big data to the legislative process.
The Politburo and State Council issued the “Rule of Law Government Development Implementation Outline (2021 – 2025)” (法治政府建设实施纲要（2021－2025年）) on 11 August, with a view to providing a “roadmap” for legislative development during the course of China’s 14th Five Year Plan.
The Outline calls for “strengthening legislation in key areas” and “actively driving legislation in key areas such as national security, tech innovation, public health, cultural education, ethnicity and religion, bio-security, ecological civilisation, risk prevention and anti-trust activity.”
It also calls for “promptly tracking and researching legal systems in relation to the digital economy, Internet finance, artificial intelligence, big data and cloud computing” and “lawfully protecting nation security, commercial secrets, natural person privacy and personal information.”
A key focus for the future legislative efforts of the Chinese government will be big data, with the Outlines calling for “strengthening analysis, mining, handling and application of big data,” and “applying big data to assist in administrative decisions, administrative legislation and administrative enforcement work.”
The Outlines also call for the “establishment and improvement of systems that apply the Internet, big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies to the implementation of administrative regulation.”
