China's top legislator calls for maintaining confidence, leveraging strength

HEFEI -- China's top legislator Zhao Leji has stressed the importance of maintaining confidence and composure, and leveraging strength and institutional advantages to fulfill goals set in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and lay a solid foundation for the next five years.

Zhao, chairman of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, made the remarks during his research and investigation tour to the provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui in East China from Monday to Thursday.

Zhao, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, stressed that the people's congresses should contribute to the country's high-quality development and social stability.

He underscored the need to uphold the Party's leadership and unswervingly follow the path of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.

Legislative work should be strengthened and improved to ensure that legal norms are timely updated, comprehensive, orderly interconnected and standardized, so as to support and safeguard reform and development, he said.

Zhao stressed the importance of local legislation's practical, supplementary, and exploratory roles, and called for correct, effective, and law-based supervision to ensure the proper implementation of the Constitution and laws.

Efforts should also be made to raise public awareness and expand orderly public participation to realize whole-process people's democracy, he added.