1. 寻衅滋事 — xúnxìn zīshì

Picking Quarrels and Provoking Trouble

A broadly defined “pocket crime” denoting behaviour that disrupts social order, often invoked by the authorities as an excuse to stifle dissent and freedom of expression.

“Picking quarrels and provoking trouble” originates in the crime of hooliganism, outlined in the Chinese criminal code of 1979. In the 1997 revision of the code, “hooliganism” was abolished and replaced with this offence, which applies to (1) arbitrarily attacking people, (2) chasing and intimidating others, (3) damaging private or public property, or (4) causing serious disorder in public places. In 2013, judicial authorities broadened its scope to cover spreading false information online. It carries a sentence of up to five years for minor offences, and five to ten years for more serious ones.

Given its broad definition, the charge is typically used as a catch-all against activists, lawyers, journalists and petitioners, alongside more mundane offences involving gambling or drunkenness. Notable people charged with it in recent years include the “Feminist Five,” detained in March 2015 for raising awareness about sexual harassment; #MeToo activist and journalist Huang Xueqin, charged in October 2019 and later detained in September 2021 for “inciting subversion of state power”; businessman Sun Dawu, charged in November 2020, likely for his political activism; and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, charged the same month and sentenced to four years for documenting the Covid-19 pandemic. In August 2022, police in Suzhou accused a woman of the offence for wearing a kimono amid rising anti-Japanese sentiment. After the A4 White Paper protests of November 2022, hundreds of young people were detained, and some — including book editor Cao Zhixin and her friends — were charged with picking quarrels and provoking trouble; Weibo bloggers and Uyghurs in Xinjiang have also been detained under the same charge.

Criticism of the offence has been growing. Luo Xiang, a prominent professor of criminal law at the China University of Political Science and Law, called it a “disgrace to the law” in a public lecture, warning that its vagueness meant the police and judiciary “will use it indiscriminately… and selectively enforce the law.” Ahead of the 2023 Two Sessions, Zhu Zhengfu, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, agreed, calling for the crime’s abolition because it risked undermining China’s legal system through selective enforcement. In August 2023, the Supreme People’s Court published an investigation concluding that officials in Zhejiang and Fujian had abused the vaguely defined crime to prosecute young people, migrant workers, the unemployed, and those who tried to petition higher authorities outside normal legal channels.

A March 2023 WeChat article by law professor and legal blogger Zhai Zhiyong argued it would be better to abolish the offence outright than to try to narrow its ambiguity: “If a particular legal offence is frequently abused or misapplied, and thus creates logical contradictions within the legal system, it must mean there is a problem with the law itself. From this perspective, the more thorough and direct solution might be to simply abolish the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, rather than attempt to eliminate its ambiguities.”