Insight · State Council

From directives to approvals: the changing shape of State Council paperwork

Chinese State Council documents carry their function in their serial number. 国发 (Guofa) marks major policy directives issued in the Council's own name; 国函 (Guohan) marks replies and approvals — answers to requests from ministries and provinces. In 2013 the library records 86 directives against 50 approvals. By 2024 the ratio had inverted to 10 against 51, and 2025 saw just 3 国发 documents all year. The center's paper output, by this measure, shifted from issuing instructions to approving requests.

Directives vs approvals, 2013–present

国函 approvals/replies国发 major directives

Crossover around 2019. (2016 and 2018 totals include archival batch uploads — see methodology — but the 国发 decline holds across the clean 2019+ window.)

One anomaly: the 2020 telegram spike

明电 (urgent telegrams) are the rarest format — 104 documents in three decades. 2020 alone accounts for 23 of them (11 State Council + 12General Office), 15.9% of that year's entire output; no other clean year exceeds 7. The spike coincides with the COVID-19 emergency-response year.

All numbers (documents per year by type)

Year	Total	国发	国办发	国函	国办函	国发明电	国办发明电	其他
2013	277	86	100	50	22	0	4	15
2014	158	52	49	25	12	1	5	14
2015	269	99	93	43	20	2	2	10
2016	740	222	316	134	38	2	2	26
2017	283	85	93	35	42	1	2	25
2018	406	76	101	120	89	1	1	18
2019	165	24	48	46	27	1	2	17
2020	145	12	51	22	25	11	12	12
2021	129	18	37	26	27	0	4	17
2022	131	21	35	44	21	0	3	7
2023	90	14	22	33	7	0	1	13
2024	119	10	23	51	6	0	1	28
2025	104	3	26	30	16	0	1	28
2026	43	7	8	6	8	0	0	14

Document types, decoded

国发Guofa · major directives · 1233 docs overall

国办发Guobanfa · General Office circulars · 1961 docs overall

国函Guohan · State Council replies/approvals · 1499 docs overall

国办函Guobanhan · General Office letters · 862 docs overall

国发明电urgent telegrams (State Council) · 22 docs overall

国办发明电urgent telegrams (General Office) · 82 docs overall

其他other · 527 docs overall

Methodology & caveats

· Counts: POST /v1/policy/search with {"group_by":["year","doctype"]}; document type is extracted from the official serial number (发文字号).
· The library indexes documents by web-publication date. 2016 and 2018 include archival batch uploads of older documents (verifiable: documents published 2018-08 carry 2012–2013 serial numbers), inflating those years' totals. Volume claims are safest for 2019+, where output is a steady 90–165 docs/year with no batch events.
· “其他” covers serial-number formats outside the six standard series.
· The latest year is partial. Data as of 2026-06-11.

Slice the corpus yourself — by theme, issuing organ, or full-text query — via the State Council policy API. More findings: Data Insights.