The statutory demands of public hearing in administrative process as articulated by the APL and the Price Law might be deemed as important signals for more public participation in administrative process, particularly in decision-making contexts. The years after 1996 have witnessed an explosion of legislation with respect to requiring public hearing at both central and local levels. At the same time, the consciousness of the right to be heard of both government officials and common people has been increasing, resulting in very encouraging practices of hearing, especially at local levels.
　　
　　II. HEARING IN PRACTICE: AN OVERVIEW
　　
　　Although the APL and the Price Law, as well as the Legislation Law, set forth the procedural requirements of public hearing, those procedural arrangements are nevertheless too general to be applied in most situations. Therefore, continuing efforts are needed to make the hearing requirements more specific and operational. The idea of public participation should not be a "legal slogan" only; rather, there have been existing the public urges to institutionalize this desirable idea, especially during the past few years. Thus, since 1996, many administrative rules and local regulations have been adopted by Ministries and Committees of the State Council and local governments or local people’s congresses. What’s more, some of those legislation have gone beyond the requirements by the APL or the Price Law, extending public hearing to other regulatory processes. Currently, these legislative efforts have resulted in different forms of public hearings in following regulatory contexts. As we will see, such experiments have shown varieties of novelties, to which we now turn.
　　
　　A. Hearing in sanction-imposing process
　　
　　Because the APL’s provisions regarding hearing procedure are too general, many central and local agencies have formulated rules to implement the hearing requirements. For example, the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labor, National Bureau of Customs, National Bureau of Taxation, and the Ministry of Public Security all have adopted their rules to implement the APL within in their jurisdictions respectively. At the same time, some local governments, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Liaoning Province, Anhui Province, Zhejiang Province, and Shangxi Province, have also adopted rules to implement the APL’s requirement. [2]

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