On February 14, 2020, President Xi Jinping stressed at the 12th meeting of the CPC Central Committee for Deepening Reform that it was imperative to strengthen the legal protection for public health, improve the formulation of laws and regulations for public health, and evaluate the revisions of laws such as the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases and the Law on the Protection of Wild Animals. The School of Juris Master of China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) acted quickly to translate his message into concrete actions, calling on relevant professional teachers to take active measures that would focus their attention on actual problems and enable them to use their theoretical knowledge as a contribution to the pandemic containment.
On February 19, Associate Professor Liu Xuanlin published an article entitled Legal Support for the Pandemic Containment and Improvements to China's Public Health Law in Chinese Social Sciences Today. The article points out that China has basically established a three-dimensional legal system for disease control, with the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases as the core, the Law on Emergency Response and the Law on the Promotion of Basic Healthcare as the upper-level laws, the Implementation Methods for the Law on the Prevention of Communicable Diseases, the Regulations on Managing Public Health Emergencies, and the Management Measures for Information Monitoring during Public Health Emergencies and Communicable Disease Outbreaks as the lower-level laws, and the Frontier Health and Quarantine Law and the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law as connecting laws. These three dimensions tackle matters from a macroscopic perspective, a mesoscopic perspective, and a microscopic perspective, respectively. The system has played a vital role in preventing, controlling, and eliminating the occurrence and prevalence of infectious diseases. Its achievements should be acknowledged, but there are still some deficiencies. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan at the end of 2019 highlighted this. Therefore, the system should be revised as soon as possible. Specifically, there are four reasons: (1) Ideas and requirements are lagging behind. 2. There are inadequate links among laws. 3. Supporting documents cannot keep up with times. 4. Cross-border risks are high.
Associate Professor Liu Xuanlin believes that, when public health emergencies occur, we need to uphold the rule of law and use legal thinking and methods to control them. A balance is required. On one hand, we need to safeguard public interests, for example, protecting people's lives and health. On the other hand, we need to avoid violating individual rights. Five dialectical notions should be adhered to in the pandemic containment: (1) Urban communities and rural areas should receive equal attention. (2) Prevention and treatment should receive equal attention. (3) The role of traditional Chinese medicine should be treated as important as that of Western medicine. (4) While using traditional technologies, new technologies, including remote medicine, Internet-based healthcare, and medical AI, should be made full use of in consultancy, the provision of medical assistance, testing, and screening, etc. (5) We should try our best to treat patients and should also protect healthcare workers effectively.
On March 1, Associate Professor Liu Xuanlin published an article entitled A Discussion on the Information Reporting System for Communicable Disease Control in this year’s 5th issue of the Journal of Law Application. The article systematically analyzes the subjects, procedures, time limits, system defects, and legal liabilities for breach of the reporting obligations stipulated in China's Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases.
