To ensure people’s participation in the legislative process, the National People's Congress has been setting up community-level legislative liaison offices. They have been hailed as a tangible success in the application of “whole-process people’s democracy”, a concept President Xi Jinping referred to for the first time during a visit to a community-level legislative liaison office in Shanghai in November 2019.

During a visit to a “courtyard meeting hall” in Beijing just before Spring Festival of 2019, President Xi Jinping hailed it as a platform for the local residents to discuss and decide their own affairs. Such grassroots participation is an example of whole-process people’s democracy, which the president has described as “the defining feature of socialist democracy; it is democracy in its broadest, most genuine, and most effective form.”