About this site
Three corpora, searched separately
This site carries three kinds of text. They belong to different systems of rules, carry different legal force, and come from different sources, so each has its own search page and the results are never merged. Putting them in one list would hide how much force any given hit actually carries — and that is the whole value of this site over a plain web search.
- Party regulations (Party Regulations Library on 12371.cn, compiled from the CPC Central Committee General Office's collection) — the Party Constitution, codes, regulations, provisions, measures, rules and detailed rules. This is a parallel body of rules: it is not ranked against national law, and this site does not rank it on anyone's behalf.
- National laws and regulations (National Database of Laws and Regulations, maintained by the General Office of the NPC Standing Committee) — the Constitution, laws, administrative regulations, supervisory regulations, local regulations and judicial interpretations, together with the amendments and the decisions to amend or repeal them.
- Tax authority documents (STA Policy and Regulations Library) — announcements of the State Taxation Administration, fiscal and tax documents, departmental rules and the like. These are departmental rules and normative documents and rank below laws and administrative regulations. They are here because a great deal of what actually governs tax practice takes this form, and the database above does not carry departmental documents.
Nothing is taken from a commercial legal database. No text is added, removed or altered: the site only structures it (into parts, chapters, sections and articles) and indexes it.
How legal force is marked
The “ladder” shown in result lists and on document pages expresses only the four levels the Legislation Law establishes in so many words: Constitution → laws → administrative regulations → local regulations.
Judicial interpretations and supervisory regulations are not on the ladder. They are marked as “off the ladder”, with the reason stated: the force of a judicial interpretation follows the law it interprets, so it is not a rung of its own; supervisory regulations are made by the National Supervisory Commission under the Constitution and the law and filed with the NPC Standing Committee, and the Legislation Law assigns them no rank. Forcing them into a tidy six-level scale would look more complete while stating as fact a judgement that does not hold up in law.
What “title only” means
The catalogue — title, issuing authority, dates, status of legal force — is complete. Full texts are being backfilled in order of legal force. An item marked “title only” has no full text yet: you can still confirm the law exists and follow the link to the official text, but its provisions are not searchable here. All three search pages have a “with full text” switch.
How search works
The full-text index is built character by character, so two-character terms such as 合同 (contract) or 债权 (claim) match precisely. Search is an exact substring match — no synonym expansion, no semantic guessing. When you are looking up a provision, “roughly the same meaning” is usually not what you want.
About this English interface
The interface exists in Chinese and English (/ and /en). The translation covers the interface and the official classification names, and stops there. Titles and the text of provisions stay in the original Chinese and are not translated, and search still matches that Chinese text character by character — an English query will find nothing.
Leaving the texts untranslated is deliberate. What this site reproduces is the official Chinese standard text, and the footer line “the standard text governs” rests on exactly that. A machine translation is not an official translation; placing one on the same page would invite readers to treat it as something that carries legal force.
What this site does not do
No court judgments (they contain the personal information of the parties, and publishing them in bulk needs a legal basis). No AI-generated legal analysis or Q&A. No one-to-one legal advice. No comments and no user accounts. These are not “later” — they are the boundary of this project.
Disclaimer
This site is a search tool for legal texts. It does not provide legal services, and nothing on it constitutes legal advice. How a law applies depends heavily on the specific facts, and the status of a provision can change through amendment or repeal. For any question about actual rights and obligations, consult a practising lawyer or ask the competent authority.
The site tries to stay in step with the official databases but does not guarantee that texts are complete, accurate or current. For Party regulations the official library publishes no status of legal force, and an older version of a regulation may sit alongside the current one; this site does not judge on its behalf. Any decision made on the basis of content here is the user's own responsibility.