The earliest secrecy legislation in China began in the Western Zhou Dynasty.

During the Western Zhou Dynasty, the original documents were collected in Tianfu, the earliest central archival institution in China's history, and the Tibetan historian was appointed to take care of it. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, a metal sealed box was also used to collect some of the most important and confidential documents.

The earliest secrecy legislation in China began in the pre-Qin period. As early as Xia and Shang Dynasties, there were secrecy managers in China, who interpreted it as "mysterious" and could not be detected by the outside world.

As Judge Zhou Li mentioned, "80% of law enforcement agencies are in charge", and the first one is "state branch", also known as "state spy". Scholar Zheng Zhong explained: "Reading is like toasting. Those who live in the country and spy on history today will steal state secrets." In other words, this part of the law is about anti-theft and anti-disclosure, and it is the earliest recorded secrecy law.

Due to the special background and cultural tradition, the logical order of information legislation in China is: secrecy legislation comes first, and public legislation comes last. The Secrecy Law was adopted by the Third Session of the Seventh the NPC Standing Committee as early as1September 5, 1988, and has been implemented since May 1980.

China successfully enacted the legislation of government information disclosure less than 20 years after the promulgation and implementation of the Secrecy Law, which is a gratifying historical progress compared with the interval of 60 years, 70 years or even hundreds of years in old capitalist countries such as Australia and Britain.