On Public Interest in Public Interest Litigation

Abstract

In 2017, China officially adopted the amendments to Article 55 of the Civil Procedure Law and Article 25 of the Administrative Procedure Law, establishing an empowering norm for public interest litigation initiated by procuratorial organs at the level of substantive law. This move addressed the long-standing institutional framework deficiencies (Li, X., 2024, pp. 169-177) in China’s procuratorial public interest litigation. However, due to its late start and the diversification of the concept of “public interest”, the law still follows a design approach that combines “specific enumeration + catch-all clause” (Li, X., 2024, pp. 169-177), failing to provide a precise definition of the scope of “public interest”. Instead, it limits the cases in which procuratorial organs can initiate public interest litigation through traditional typological enumeration. The traditional typological approach has inherent flaws, such as incompleteness and inadequacy, making it unable to address the challenges in defining practical interests. To address this, a revised typological approach could be adopted to exclude situations that do not fall under public interest, thereby reducing the uncertainty surrounding the concept of public interest and providing intellectual support for improving relevant legislation and guiding judicial practice.