Duan Zhengkun, vice-minister of justice, made the remark at a press conference Tuesday, adding that China plans to complete the establishment of auxiliary laws before 2010, so as to provide a legal insurance for the work of notarization.

He said the current notary system is a governmental system, which could not adapt to China's socialist market economy and the global notary systems.

China began reforming its notary system in 1993, and in 1994, a national conference decided to transform the country's notary system from a governmental one to an institutional one.

Currently, some 20 percent of China's notary offices are professional institutions.

Meanwhile, the quality examination of China's public notaries will be opened to the public. For the coming national notaries examination in September, more than three-fourths of the applicants are from outside the notarial service system.

Duan also pointed out that the reform will further perfect the notary compensation system, so as to promote notary agencies to become real institutional legal bodies, which can independently conduct their business, bear liability, and carry out the functions of notarization following market rules and the operation of self-regulation.

China now boasts of some 3,200 public notary offices, with a total staff of more than 18,000.

Coming into being in the early 1950s, China's public notary system was abolished in 1957 and then resumed in 1978.

In 1982, the State Council promulgated China's first public notary regulation, namely the Interim Regulation on Public Notary of the People's Republic of China.

(People's Daily)