“Queer Unintelligibility in China”:
Homosexuality in China was never technically criminalised or pathologised in the same way. Rather than targeting homosexuals for persecution, the Chinese State—from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the Republican era (1911–49) and into the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present)—has largely rendered them invisible through systemic denial of their existence.
Pointing out that in the Qing archives there is not ‘a single case of consensual sodomy being punished in the absence of other, more serious crimes’, Sommer (2000: 116) argues that what bothered Qing lawmakers was not the sexual orientation of the partners but homosexual rape.
one of the most striking cases occurred in 1991, when a man named Lin Jiabao in Anhui filed an official complaint against his daughter and her same-sex partner, accusing them of crimes of ‘tongxinglian’ and demanding their arrest. Unsure how to respond, the local authorities forwarded the case to the Public Security Department, which eventually issued a statement that became the first instance of a juridical interpretation of tongxinglian in Chinese law. According to the statement, tongxinglian had no legal definition in Chinese law and therefore the reported incident had no merit. In his analysis of the proceedings, Chinese legal scholar Zhou Dan (2009) argues that the significance of the Lin case lies less in what it reveals about the treatment of homosexuals than in what it demonstrates about law as a continual process of rhetorical suturing and articulation.