In March 1996, the Fourth Assembly of the Eighth National People’s Congress of China passed the Administrative Penalty Law. It is another important piece of administrative legislation following the passage of the Administrative Litigation Law (April 1989) and the State Compensation Law (May 1994). The enactment of this law has a significant impact on compelling the administrative agencies to govern by law. Prior to this legislation, many Chinese laws and regulations had set forth provisions of administrative penalties. According to the statistics, over 100 types of administrative penalties were specified by various laws and regulations. Yet there were no unified legal provisions about the basic principles of administrative penalties. As a result, abusive impositions of penalties and fines existed in practice. In some instances, a single act was penalized by several agencies. There are several reasons for this situation: (I) the power to establish administrative penalties was not clearly defined and some agencies had set up administrative penalties as they pleased; (2) regulations were confusing as to who had the authority to enforce penalties and, as a result, many organizations or individuals imposed penalties when they did not have the authorities; and (3) lack of clear procedural requirements in enforcing administrative penalties had led to largely arbitrary enforcement. The promulgation of the Administrative Penalty Law was aimed at normalizing and restraining the government’s manner of enforcing punishment so that arbitrary penalties and fines will be put to an end and the lawful rights of citizens, legal persons and other organizations will be protected.

Columbia Journal of Asian Law, Vol. 10 No. 1 (1996)