In July 2016, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of National Security, and the Ministry of Justice jointly issued the Opinions on Advancing the Trial-Centered Reform of the Criminal Procedure System. Recently, Professor Xiong Qiuhong, Head of the Procedure Law Department of CASS Law Institute, was interviewed by the newspaper Legal Evening on several hot issues in the Opinions. In the interview, Professor Xiong pointed out that “advancing trial-centered reform of the criminal procedure system” is one of the important reforms launched by the CPC at the Third Plenary Session of its Eighteenth National Congress. The reform has three basic dimensions: first, taking the trial as the center of the relationship between the three stages of criminal procedure, namely investigation, prosecution and trial; second, taking the court trial as the center of the trial stage of criminal procedure; and third, taking the trial of the first instance as the center of different levels of trial. The Opinions take the improving the case-handling quality and preventing miscarriage of justice as the main objective of the reform. To achieve this objective, the Opinions have provided for a series of measures to regulate investigation carried out by public security organs and strengthen the supervision over the decision on prosecution made by procuratorial organs. For example, the Opinions require investigation organs and people’s procuratorates “to collect, determine, examine, and use evidence in accordance with the requirement and standard of court trial”; “to establish a guidance system for the collection of evidence in different type of cases”; “to establish a system for the recording and videotaping of the entire process of search, examination, and identification of evidence in murder cases and other major criminal cases”, and “to improve the rules on the transfer, examination, and court investigation, and the out-of-court verification of technical investigation evidence”. Safeguarding the defense right of the defendant is an important aspect of the substantiation of court trial. The Opinions contain a number of provisions in this respect, such as those requiring investigation organs to verify the defense opinions of the criminal suspect and his lawyer in accordance with law, safeguarding the defense lawyer’s right to meet his client, to consult the case file, to obtain evidence, to question the evidence presented by the prosecution and to engage in debate with the prosecution in court, and establishing the system of duty lawyer system for legal aid.