This research focuses on executive-legislative relations in China. By exploring the evolution of executive-legislative relations in China, the mechanism and factors that shape executive-legislative relations are critically analysed from the perspective of the Chinese legislative process. More specifically, this study pursues answers to the following research questions: (1) What are the executive-legislative relations in the Chinese legislative process? (2) How has the National People’s Congress (NPC) evolved from the perspective of executive-legislative relations? (3) What are the factors that influence executive-legislative relations in China’s legislative process? (4) What type of legislature is the NPC? Overall, the thesis aims to make a contribution to knowledge and understanding of the Chinese legislature.Building on the existing literature, this thesis makes a new attempt to study Chinese legislative development by applying the concept of executive-legislative relations. Empirically, primary legislative data updated until 2013, elite interviews, and a case study of the amendment of the Budget Law constitute the main sources of data.Based on the study of the interactive relationship between the legislative and executive branches at five legislative stages, comprising legislative planning, drafting and initiation, deliberation, voting and promulgation, and the post-legislative stages, three models are put forward to make sense of executive-legislative relations in the Chinese legislative process: the autonomy model, the cooperative coexistence model and the competing model. Meanwhile, a new division of the evolution phases of the NPC (initial period, oscillation period, golden decade, and stable and decline period) is identified in the concluding chapter. In addition, external (the Chinese Communist Party’s policy and the wider political culture) and internal factors (institutionalisation and professionalization) are summarised as the main factors determining executive-legislative relations in China’s legislative process.The findings show that the NPC does play a significant role in the Chinese political system, although the NPC has typically been under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. The findings also call into question the continued applicability of Mezey’s classic typology of legislatures to the development of the Chinese legislature. A new approach to classifying legislatures is introduced based on the institutionalisation and professionalization of a legislature
