A Realistic Path to Implementing China’s Budget Law

Abstract

The core issue for the implementation of modern budget law is to optimize the satisfaction of society’s demand for public goods. The form of implementation mechanism that will best achieve this goal has thus become a major topic in the field of legal research. To go beyond the Anglo-Saxon budget model and construct a realistic path for the implementation of China’s budget law, this issue needs to be explored from the perspective of Chinese citizens in a way that safeguards the fundamental interests of the people and is premised on upholding and improving the People’s Congress system, so as to achieve a balance between internal and external budget allocation relationships. There are three routes to implementing China’s budget law: the political, the social, and the judicial. Under the first, citizens’ political identity interests are represented by deputies who oversee the budgetary powers of administrative bodies through the People’s Congress. Under the second, citizens individually or collectively participate, influence or even decide the allocation of public economic resources through dialogue, negotiation, reasoning and argument with the responsible budgetary agency in the course of the budget’s compilation, examination and approval, execution and supervision. Under the third, the establishment of a system for budgetary litigation allows citizens to participate in and supervise the implementation of the budget law, individually or collectively. This provides judicial security for the law’s implementation. These three realistic implementation routes represent the dialectical unity of concerted institutional effort aimed directly at effective implementation of budget law. Judicial interpretations of budget law implementation indicate the importance and urgency of promoting national governance capacity through reform of the legal systems governing finance and taxation. This explains the significant role of finance and taxation law in national governance.