State Governance Through Oversight: A Review of the Recording and Review System in China

China’s Recording and Review system has emerged as a central mechanism of constitutional supervision and has attracted increasing scholarly attention over the past decade. Although constitutional review has been extensively studied in comparative constitutional law, research on China’s R&R system remains fragmented and lacks a systematic synthesis. This article presents a systematic review of the legal literature on the Recording and Review system. Organized around three stages of the Recording and Review system, the review synthesizes the principal doctrinal debates, identifies areas of scholarly consensus and disagreement, and highlights unresolved theoretical questions. It shows that existing scholarship has primarily focused on the institutional foundations and constitutional legitimacy of the Recording and Review system, while issues relating to review methods, review standards, and corrective mechanisms remain comparatively underexplored. By providing an analytically structured assessment of the existing literature, this review contributes to a deeper understanding of China’s legislature-centered model of constitutional supervision and establishes an agenda for future theoretical and empirical research.