Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Intensifying the Improvement of Social Security by Taking Comprehensive Measures

Decision of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Intensifying the Improvement of Social Security by Taking Comprehensive Measures DECISION OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE OF THE NATIONAL PEOPLE'S CONGRESS ON INTENSIFYING THE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIAL SECURITY BY TAKING COMPREHENSIVE MEASURES (Adopted at the 18th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress on March 2, 1991) For the purpose of safeguarding public security and social order, maintaining the stability of the State and society, and ensuring the smooth progress of reform, opening up to the outside world, and the socialist modernization drive so as to create a favourable environment in respect of social order for the full realization of the Ten-year Programme for the National Economic and Social Development and the Eighth Five-year Plan, it is imperative to improve social security by taking comprehensive measures. To this end, the following decisions are made: 1. Intensifying the improvement of social security by taking comprehensive measures is an important task in the maintenance of the people's democratic dictatorship and an essential way to the solution of the public security problem in our country. The public security problem is a comprehensive reflection of all sorts of social contradictions. The all-round improvement must thus be carried out by mobilizing and organizing all social forces and employing political, legal, administrative, economic, cultural and educational means so as to prevent and reduce at their root lawbreaking offences and crimes, maintain social order and safeguard social stability. Furthermore, the all-round improvement of social security should be regarded as a common responsibility of the whole society, and be persisted in as a long-term task. 2. The principle of employing both suppressive and preventive measures and seeking both temporary and permanent solutions with the latter as the emphasis must be adhered to in the all-round improvement of social security. Its main objectives are: to attack all types of law-breaking and criminal activities that jeopardise the society, and severely punish according to law the criminals seriously jeopardizing public security; to take various measures to strengthen the control system, intensify crime prevention work and stop up loopholes which may allow law-breaking or criminal activities to take place; to intensify ideological, political and legal education among all the citizens, especially among the adolescents so as to raise their cultural level, heighten their moral quality, and increase their legal awareness; to encourage the masses to consciously maintain social order and combat law-breaking and criminal activities; to take positive steps to mediate or pacify disputes among people so as to ease social strains and elim......