THE new chairman of the National People's Congress, Mr Qiao Shi, has made a bold bid to expand the power of the legislature and promote ''socialist democracy''.
Mr Qiao, ranked third in the Communist Party's politburo, vowed at the first session of the congress' standing committee yesterday that the parliament ''should, as an institution of national power, develop its supervisory role'' over the Government.
The leader of the party's moderate faction also pledged to reactivate the old slogan of ''rendering decision-making democratic and scientific''.
''We must perfect the supervisory mechanism of the NPC Standing Committee,'' he said.
''We must do a good job of legal supervision, so as to guarantee the effective implementation of the constitution and the laws.'' Legal sources in China said not since Mr Peng Zhen, who was NPC chairman in the mid-1980s, had a head of the legislature put so much emphasis on the Chinese conception of the rule of law.
They said Mr Qiao, a former head of the party's legal and security establishment, was highlighting the chronic phenomenon of party and government cadres disobeying the law.