The 2nd reading draft of China’s Procuratorate Public Interest Litigation Law was released last month, and an English comparative chart showing changes from the original is below.
After the law is finalized, I’ll provide a more detailed breakdown, but I want to provide a brief overview of Procuratorate Public Interest Litigation and to address some questions about the article’s application to foreigners that have recently been raised (including in some articles quoting me).
Procuratorate Public Interest Litigation (PPIL)
The PPIL system started as a means of providing effective court remedies for mass harms, as the public was increasingly frustrated with how recurring scandals in areas such as environmental pollution and food safety were being addressed.
While the law technically allowed for some mass cases, initiating them faced large hurdles:
First, these cases are complex and resource-intensive, while China’s civil society that might push such them forward is anemic.
Second, the government is wary of organized citizen movements (part of the reason for the weak civil society), especially as the grievances in the cases could be against the state or state-owned enterprises
The Procuratorate in China is more than a prosecutor’s office, but also contains departments for ‘legal supervision (this is why it has the unique and difficult-to-pronounce English name). Its legal supervision authority means it has the power to oversee whether the law is implemented ‘correctly’ by administrative agencies, and even courts.
Its legal supervision functions and staff of trained legal professionals made it a good fit for taking on these complex cases in the name of the public interest, although designated civil society groups still have a role. PPIL has become one of the procuratorate’s four core work areas (alongside criminal case handling, civil supervision, and administrative supervision), a shift likely related in part to its loss of duties to investigate corruption cases to the new Supervision system in 2018.
Sometimes Public Interest Litigation isn’t ‘Litigation’.
The table above shows the massive number of PPIL cases that the procuratorate handled each year since 2021.
There is a catch, however: Most PPIL isn’t litigation in the sense of court proceedings at all.
Of the 135,580 cases the procuratorate handled in 2025, lawsuits were only filednin 7,305 of them.
This is because PPIL is divided into two types,
- Civil PPIL- initiated against civil entities such as businesses, organizations, or individuals for tortious harm to the public interest
- Administrative PPIL- Against government agencies, for failing to act or taking improper action, in harm to the public interest.
Administrative PPIL is a natural extension of the procuratorate’s legal supervision authority, and makes up about 91% of all cases ‘handled’. It also rarely goes to court as the procuratorate is required to first make recommended corrections, which are usually adopted to avoid court.
Civil cases are relatively rare, but are much more likely to actually go to court.
The Scope of Litigation
Both administrative and civil public interest litigation cases are restricted to certain areas in existing authority and article 3 of the draft law. The Venn-diagram below shows the fields as delineated in the draft, showing those areas that can be pursued against both private and public offenders, those that are limited to government offenders (admin cases), and those that can only be pursued against private defendants (civil). [Note that violations of personal information are in the purely civil area, although government agencies can violate personal privacy]
This list has gradually expanded over time, as the system has proven successful. Ethnic Unity, for example, is new in the law.
Below is an even more granular chart, showing specific case numbers for 2025 in subcategories of these general categories. Remember, most of these cases were administrative cases against government agencies (~91%) and only about 5% of all cases actually went to court.
Extraterritoriality?
Article 51 of the law, one of its two supplemental provisions, allows that:
“The people’s procuratorates may lawfully initiate public interest litigation against foreign organizations and individuals that carry out unlawful conduct that infringes on our nation’s lawful interests or societal public interest.”
This has led some to fear that public interest litigation might become a new tool for singling out foreign businesses and individuals.
An article in Lawfare even declares that when there is a foreign defendant, this article is the sole restriction, and that the case doesn’t not to fit in any of the article 3 categories discussed above so long as there is harm to the national or societal public interest.
Did the drafters of this technical procedure law intend for its penultimate article (in the supplemental section) to override all of the preceding rules for how and when procuratorate PIL can occur, so long as the defendant is foreign?
It seems unlikely. Much more likely is that the rest of the law still applies when foreigners are involved, and that this article is meant only to confirm that foreign entities are also subject to the law.
Harm to the National Interest and Societal Public Interest
This language is not a unique standard for foreigners, but is a part of the core definition of the public interest throughout. Article 3’s subject areas are also all subject to the requirement that there be a harm to the national interest or societal public interest.
While the terms are vague, they seem aimed at emphasizing that not all harms in these areas meet the requirements for public interest litigation. In Guiding Cases released by the Procuratorate, they have attempted begun to address the scope of ‘public interest’, saying that it is
- Held by a large, open-ended class.
- Involves a fundamental interest
- Is a shared right, not just a collection of many individual rights (though at scale, individual harms to privacy, health, etc. are threats to public order)
- evolves with social values
Do Foreigners have anything to worry about?
Yes. The article makes it clear that foreigners may be the subjects of civil public interest litigation if they commit torts in the listed categories that impact the public interest.
This could conceivably involve not only their pollution or food safety violations, but also perceived harms in more amorphous areas such as ‘ethnic unity. But China has much more direct tools to punish foreign firms for [who still continue doing business there] for such violations. Public interest litigation is a poor fit, as civil public interest litigation must address compensation for a specific harm, but it remains a possibility, even before the law is passed.
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