Both in letter and spirit

Therefore, China has to reform its constitutional review system to make its Constitution effective. It can be argued that a new constitutional review agency should be set up and its interpretations and decisions should be legally binding on all public offices, including the top ones. In other words, its decisions should be followed by all departments and agencies, including the NPC.

This, however, is not possible. Considering China's political system, in which people's courts are appointed by people's congresses and have to be responsible to them, it is impossible to empower normal courts, even the Supreme People's Court, to conduct constitutional review. Court rulings and interpretations are not binding on people's congresses and many departments and agencies, because that would challenge the current political pyramid that has the NPC sitting on top.

For the same reason, it is not possible to form an independent agency to conduct constitutional review. In case such an agency is formed, it would face the same difficulty of not being able to supervise high-ranking agencies.

So, instead of simply importing a system from developed countries, China should consider a new mechanism: an independent and competent agency to review the constitutionality of laws and regulations, which, instead of making decisions would act as consultant to the NPC. That will ensure effective constitutional review without fundamentally changing the current political system, just like the Appellate Committee used to do for the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.

If establishing an independent body is impossible, the NPC could at least set up a "constitutional review committee" comprising its members to attend to the task. Of course, its performance may not be as good as an independent agency's.

In the meantime, legislators should start drafting the laws for constitutional review in order to offer legal support to the process. Without laws that make constitutional review executable, the Constitution cannot be fully implemented.

This is a political challenge for the new leadership. The leadership has achieved breakthroughs on many fronts, and hopefully it will succeed on the constitutional review front too.

The author is a professor of law at East China University of Political Science and Law.