From Procedural Completeness to Audit-Proof Security: The Public Disclosure Gap in Rules Governing the Disclosure of Foreign-Related Impacts and Agency Relationships by Legislative Proposal Submitters to the National People's Congress

This paper employs the OSINT evidence auditing methodology for normative texts, using publicly available and verifiable normative documents as the evidentiary boundary. It examines the configuration of disclosure rules governing foreign influence and agency relationships of proposal entities during the legislative proposal stage of the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee. Through clause-by-clause verification of authoritative texts including the Legislation Law and the Rules of Procedure of the NPC/NPCSC, this study finds that current disclosure rules adequately address meeting procedures and the structure of attached materials versus exceptions. However, they fail to codify provisions concerning disclosure of foreign influence/agency relationships, the entities and standards for tiered verification, and the closed-loop audit trail field. Guided by the principle of proportionality, this paper proposes a minimal closed-loop solution comprising ‘minimum disclosure set—tiered verification—audit trail—security exceptions/remedies’. It provides a set of trigger conditions, threshold calibration mechanisms, and an audit field dictionary directly embeddable into regulations to support the upgrade of legislative security through auditability. Furthermore, the Explanatory Notes on the Draft Amendment to the Legislation Law of the People's Republic of China indicate that the amendment seeks to strengthen disclosure of ‘explanatory statements and reports’ alongside constitutional review information: For instance, it mandates that explanatory notes to draft laws include relevant opinions concerning constitutionality issues. It further requires timely publication of legal texts, announcements, draft explanatory notes, deliberation outcome reports, and other materials in the Gazette of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and on the NPC website, thereby providing institutional interfaces for establishing ‘audit-safe’ rule-based traceability. However, this explanatory note itself does not constitute a mandatory provision for disclosing and verifying ‘proposing entities' foreign-related impacts/agency relationships’. The Rules of Procedure of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China further stipulate: When a delegation or 30 or more deputies jointly propose a bill, the Presidium shall decide whether to include it in the agenda. For bills included in the agenda, the proposers and relevant institutions ‘shall provide relevant materials,’ and the proposers ‘shall submit an explanatory statement on the bill.’ Concurrently, meetings shall be held publicly as a principle, with closed sessions permitted when necessary, establishing an ‘open-as-a-rule, closed-as-an-exception’ institutional framework.