A family spends time together in Bachu county, Kashgar prefecture, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, on July 21, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]

In Urumqi, Ili and Kuqa in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, legislative outreach offices are now physically embedded within comprehensive service centers, mediation hubs and even public plazas. At the lower administrative level, these liaison points share space with township government halls, neighborhood committee offices and routine administrative service counters.

As a result, in an office building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, judges, lawyers, community officials and local legislators can be seen collecting feedback on a draft neighborhood management regulation — not in a separate hearing room, but in a common area where residents come for totally unrelated matters, such as property registration or passport applications. The idea is simple: crowded places will have people with a broader and more diverse range of opinions, while allowing citizens to participate in legislative consultation without making an additional trip.

In Baiyang village, Kuqa, local farmers and herders attend a village night school three times weekly, devoting one hour to learning Putonghua and another hour to legal education. The legal segment serves to explain upcoming laws — such as the Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law set to take effect on July 1 — and to gather opinion on bills that are under review.

By taking legislative outreach to an existing educational program, the village reduces duplication of staffing, facilities and funding, while also ensuring a smooth consultation process. As the village head put it, when people understand what a law says and how it affects their lives, they become more attentive, more capable of identifying problems and more likely to offer constructive suggestions — thus improving both participation and legislative quality.

Such outreach is an innovative initiative launched by the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee in 2015, with the aim of bridging the gap between the public and lawmakers, as well as seeking opinions on legislative items from people in various walks of life. To date, China has established 60 such offices, soliciting over 77,000 public opinions on 224 pieces of legislation.

The model contrasts with an earlier practice in which government agencies operated in relative isolation, each maintaining separate offices, staff members and budgets. For many residents, this often meant confusion over which office handled which matter, and unnecessary travel between multiple locations. The newer integrated approach reduces red tape.

Underlying this change is a reorientation in how government performance is understood. In late February, the Communist Party of China launched a Party-wide campaign to guide its members, especially officials, in establishing and practicing a correct understanding of governance performance. The campaign will run until July.

Under the campaign, Party members and government officials are urged to proceed from reality, act in accordance with the laws, and deliver results that can stand the test of practice and history, truly benefit the people, and earn public recognition through sound decision-making and solid work. It highlights a principle that essentially measures policy outcomes not through visible or large-scale projects, but by whether they serve public needs sustainably and practically.

Placing legislative outreach in busy service halls, or embedding legal education into village night schools, may lack spectacle, but these choices reflect a deliberate calculation: that saving people’s time, lowering administrative costs and making government services more approachable are themselves valid measures of effective governance.

This may not appear to be dramatic institutional reform. Yet the change is less about slogans or infrastructure than about reorganizing existing resources to reduce unnecessary movement, lower overheads and open more accessible channels for public input. Whether viewed from within or beyond, there is a practical logic to a system that meets people where they already are — both physically and in their daily routines — and that treats efficiency and responsiveness not as secondary concerns, but as integral to public service itself.