Administrative Law in The People's Republic of China - Administrative Litigation

Administrative Litigation

The Administrative Procedure Law (APL) also known as the Administrative Litigation Law (ALL) allows parties to bring suit when their "legitimate rights and interests" are infringed by a specific administrative act of an administrative organ or its personnel.

The APL has often been used by plaintiffs asserting that local governments have illegally taken land or imposed taxes.

Several Chinese dissidents have invoked administrative law. In 1991, Guo Ruoji, formerly a professor at Nanjing University, sued the Communist Party committee of his university for stripping him of his professorship and banning him from travelling abroad. Both the Nanjing Intermediate Court and the Jiangsu Provincial Supreme People's Court ruled against Guo, on the grounds that acts of the Communist Party of China is not an administrative organ. Several other dissidents filed similar lawsuits against the government and the CPC. In 1993, Yuan Hongbing, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing, sued the university's CPC committee for banning a book he had edited, The Tide of History, which attacked leftist orthodox views. In 1998, Li Weiping, a Wuhan-based dissident, used the administrative law to sue the head of the city's Public Security Bureau for the seizure of his passport.