On April 18, China's top court held a meeting to review judicial work in the first quarter of the year.

Presided over by Zhang Jun, president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), the meeting also discussed prioritized tasks for the near future.

A group of encouraging data on the country's judicial work was released at the meeting, and the attendees all agreed that courts at various levels in China had improved the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of trials following the guiding principles of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and this year's two sessions.

The meeting adhered to a problem-oriented approach while fully acknowledging the achievements made in judicial work. The attendees discussed solutions to typical problems and inadequacies found in court work, such as lower satisfaction rate with case filing and second instance hearing rate in some courts. 

Zhang urged for better governance of litigation at the source and called for more research and studies on the problems reflected in cases so as to address them at the source and reduce case increments. 

He stressed the SPC's role as an instructor to help lower-level courts identify unusual circumstances in trials and then address them after analysis. 

It's necessary to make better use of judicial data and make the analysis thereof reflect the trial work in a more comprehensive, accurate, and objective way, which in turn will help the SPC improve the top-level design of its supervision and guiding system, the chief justice noted.