Constitution of the People's Republic of China

The Constitution of the People's Republic of China is a communist state constitution and the supreme law of the People's Republic of China. Earlier attempts at a constitutional system in China date to the end of the Qing dynasty, which fell after the 1911 Revolution; the newly established Republic of China adopted a Provisional Constitution in 1912 providing for a parliamentary system, but it proved largely ineffective as the country disintegrated into the Warlord Era. In September 1949 the first plenary session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference adopted the Common Program, which served as a temporary constitution after the founding of the People's Republic of China that October, and the first proper constitution was adopted by the first session of the 1st National People's Congress on 20 September 1954. That constitution underwent a major revision during the Cultural Revolution in 1975 and further revisions in 1978 after the Cultural Revolution ended. The current constitution was adopted by the 5th National People's Congress on 4 December 1982, during the reform and opening up period, and it has since gone through five subsequent revisions. Consisting of four chapters and 143 articles, the constitution sets out the nature and basic policies of the People's Republic of China, establishes the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party over the country, enshrines the concept of democratic centralism, and states that China is a socialist state governed by a people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on an alliance of workers and peasants; it also stipulates that central and local state institutions operate under a system of people's congresses, community-level self-governance and regional ethnic autonomy.