Wang Yi, Urban Legislation in Contemporary China, Beijing: Law Press China, April 2023 

This book aims to systematically outline the theoretical and practical issues of urban legislation in China. On the basis of revealing the practical significance and the rule of law implication of urban legislation and by applying the theory of legislation and the thinking mode of the sociology of law, it makes preliminary explorations of the demands, competence, matters, and mechanism of urban legislation. On the premise that the Legislation Law has allowed cities divided into districts to exercise local legislative power, it tries to put forward some constructive suggestions, which are mainly concentrated in chapters 5 and 6, aimed at improving the Chinese practice of urban legislation in the future. The core propositions of Chapter5 include but are not limited to: the local affairs involved in urban governance are diverse and complex, which not only affect the daily life of ordinary citizens but also determine the level of comprehensive governance and competitiveness of cities and affect the advancement of urbanization and the sustainable development of cities. In the process of urban legislation, the selection and grasp of legislative matters should not stay at the current factual level. Efforts should also be made to take care of the future needs of urban development and comprehensively consider many factors at the value level. Chapter 6 focuses on the innovation of the urban legislative mechanism. The author of this book holds that, in order to make good use of local legislative power in the future, cities divided into districts must attach importance to the design and improvement of the urban legislative mechanism and optimize urban legislative procedures, so as to raise the democratic and scientific level of urban legislation. Compared with local governance in the general sense, urban governance is more professional, and citizens' aspirations for democracy, justice and other values and their enthusiasm for participating in governance are higher. As a result, the development of urban legislative work is more dependent on the design of sophisticated mechanisms and it is necessary to explore ways of further empowering cities, so as to ensure that the local legislative power enjoyed by cities can be exercised in a standardized and scientific process and the institutional expectations of raising urban governance level, enhancing the comprehensive competitiveness of cities and improving the index of the people's happiness can be realized.