This database collects Chinese laws, regulations, and normative documents from 1927 to the present, covering central and local legislation, with a total volume exceeding 5.27 million entries. Each entry includes core metadata such as document title, effectiveness hierarchy, issuing authority, issuance document number, promulgation date, effective date, and timeliness status. Additionally, each entry is linked to its corresponding full text (TXT format) through a unique body ID. This massive, multi-dimensional dataset comprehensively documents the historical process and latest developments of China's rule of law construction, providing a solid data foundation for legal research, policy analysis, quantitative investment, and corporate compliance.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive Coverage and Long Historical Span: The data spans from 1927 to 2025, encompassing laws and regulations from various historical periods before and after the founding of the People's Republic of China. With a total volume of 5.27 million entries, the number of regulations surged after the 1978 Reform and Opening Up, with recent annual publications exceeding 300,000 entries, fully presenting the evolution of China's legal system.
- Rich Metadata Dimensions and Flexible Filtering: Each entry includes key attributes such as effectiveness hierarchy, issuing authority, and regulatory category, enabling users to quickly locate target regulations across different dimensions. For example, users can filter all "financial" "departmental rules" with one click or extract all legislation issued by a specific authority in a given year.
- Dynamic Timeliness Annotation for Tracking Regulatory Evolution: Each regulation is annotated with its current timeliness status (currently effective, amended, repealed/expired, or not yet effective). This allows users to accurately identify valid norms within the legal system and trace the revision and repeal history of regulations.
- Full-Text Association Supporting In-Depth Analysis: Each regulation corresponds to its TXT full text via a "body ID," enabling users to directly access complete legal provisions. The extensive full-text corpus facilitates natural language processing, text mining, and machine learning modeling.
Application Value:
- Legal Research and Policy Analysis: Scholars can utilize this database to conduct quantitative legislative research, such as analyzing shifts in legislative focus across different periods, legislative activity levels of various authorities, and amendment frequencies of laws and regulations. Combined with timeliness information, researchers can study the "half-life" and repeal patterns of regulations, providing data support for rule of law evaluation. Statistics show that financial regulatory regulations increased significantly after the 2008 global financial crisis, with another surge following the 2015 stock market crash. This database enables rapid identification and analysis of relevant regulations and their policy intentions.
- Quantitative Investment Strategy Development: Quantitative funds can incorporate factors such as regulation release dates, effectiveness hierarchy, and regulatory categories as event-driven factors to construct investment strategies. For instance, positioning in related stocks when major favorable policies are introduced in specific sectors (e.g., environmental protection, pharmaceuticals), or predicting market risks by analyzing the frequency of regulatory releases. This database allows for tracking annual changes in the number of "industrial policy" regulations, combined with industry index trends, to verify policy impacts on markets and provide historical backtesting for quantitative models.
- Corporate Compliance and Risk Management: Enterprises can leverage the timeliness annotations to quickly filter currently effective regulations applicable to their business operations and establish dynamic compliance lists. Simultaneously, by monitoring new regulations in specific fields, companies can adjust business strategies promptly to reduce compliance risks. For example, a fintech company seeking all currently effective "data security" regulations can filter by "cybersecurity/data security" category and limit timeliness to "currently effective" to obtain a complete list, significantly enhancing compliance efficiency.
- Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing: The vast corpus of legal text provides ideal training material for legal AI models. Researchers can develop applications such as legal document generation, case element extraction, and legal Q&A systems using this data, advancing legal technology. Based on the full-text corpus, BERT-class models can be trained for tasks like regulation classification, summarization, or similarity matching to build intelligent legal retrieval systems that offer precise regulation recommendations.
The CnOpenData China Laws and Regulations Comprehensive Database establishes an authoritative and reliable legal information cornerstone through its comprehensive coverage, rich metadata, dynamic timeliness annotations, and complete full texts. Whether you are a scholar engaged in legal research, a financial expert developing quantitative strategies, or a practitioner dedicated to corporate compliance and legal technology innovation, this database will provide solid data support to help you discover value and gain insights in your respective fields.
Data Scale
Time Range
1949-2025
Field Display
Sample Data
Data Update Frequency
Annual updates