China’s top political advisory body has to answer every single proposal submitted within 120 days. Each year there are thousands of proposals, so the quality of the answers is put to test. CCTV reporter Ai Yang talks to a representative about what level of attention proposals can receive.

2013 is Wen Xiangcai’s sixth year as a CPPCC representative. During her first five year tenure, she submitted a total of about 30 environment-related proposals, as she herself is an expert in that area.

Wen Xiangcai said, "I became a representative in 2008. In my first proposal, I suggested the country set up a management method for environmental monitoring. At that time pollution was already a hot issue, but there lacked a unified system. So the environmental ratings always aroused questions and doubts."

At that time, China already had more than 300 thousand people monitoring the environment, and tens of thousands monitoring institutions across the country. But they belonged to different organizations ranging from the Maritime Bureau to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Sometimes work was overlapped, and different rating standards also caused controversies when different results came out at the same time. Wen’s proposal arrived at the right time for change, as that issue had been already attracting growing concerns.

A few months later, an institutional reform took place in the Ministry of Environmental Protection, and a department of environmental monitoring was set up. The new body is now in charge of overall management, such as policy making and standard setting.

Wen Xiangcai said, "I’m satisfied by the CPPCC’s answers and I’ve seen that my proposals have really worked."

Wen says she was encouraged and in the following years she submitted more suggestions. In a 2010 proposal, she suggested legislating soil protection, as food safety was attracting increasing attention. The proposal was dealt with, and two years later drafting work has begun. On the other hand, not all proposals receive the same level of attention.

Liu Yingqi, department head of Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese kmt, said, "Preparing proposals can take up to an entire year as we must organize research trips, expert surveys and many meetings to confirm a final submission. It represents a lot of hard work. Although the CPPCC’s written feedback is always prompt, in the future we hope to see more future planning in the feedback rather than a summary report of what has already been done. Also there’re times when the reply is rather vague and bureaucratic."