This is a translation to this original post: https://x.com/amiercreer/status/2056941616321957901 ; proxied link: https://nitter.net/amiercreer/status/2056941616321957901

May 2026, the Research Office of China’s Supreme People’s Court issued a written reply to a petition[1] about judicial protection against LGBTQ discrimination, citing previous precedents, stating that they are “continuing to monitor the situation”.[2] The response was partially interpreted on the social media as “a dawn breaking the binary order”. The legal nature of this reply – that a petition response is not a judicial interpretation, is non-justiciable, unenforceable, and carries no normative force – has already been accurately analysed by another one[3]. This article is not going to make the tautology, but to ask a more fundamental question: Why the state chose to respond in this form? What does this kind of response signify in the logic of political operations?

To answer this question, we must shift focus from the text to a concept that has accumulated a significant amount of empirical evidence in the field of Chinese political studies in recent years: authoritarian responsiveness.

Authoritarian Responsiveness: an Essential Analytical Framework

Over the past fifteen years, political scientists have done a vast amount of research surrounding a seemingly contradictory phenomenon: Why would a regime without competitive elections take the trouble of responding to citizens’ demands?

Earlier explanations emphasised top-down information extraction functions. An on-site audit experiment of over two thousand county-level “mayor’s mailboxes” nationwide carried out by Distelhorst and Hou indicates that the response rate of Chinese local governments to citizen correspondence is roughly equivalent to that of similar institutions in democratic countries, but the driving force behind this responsiveness is not electoral pressure, but rather the demand for grass-roots governance information from the superior accountability system.[4] Field experiments by Chen, Pan, and Xu further found that when citizens’ letters contain threats of collective action or hints of reporting to higher authorities, the probability of a response from the county-level government increases significantly; conversely, indicating one’s identity as a loyal party member has no effect on the response rate. [5] In other words, what drives the response is not an acknowledgement of citizen rights, but a preventive assessment of instability.

However, these studies simultaneously reveal a key limitation: there is a systematic disconnect between the content of the responses and the substance of the demands. The concept of “mechanical responsiveness”, proposed by Hu, Gong, and Zhao based on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024, precisely captures such a mechanism: under the pressure of digitalised accountability, grass-roots officials meet procedural targets with high response rates, yet there is almost no correspondence between the content of these responses and the substance of the complaints.[6] The data show that, even with an annual case resolution rate as high as 91%, complaints that are truly fully resolved account for only 32.4%. From another perspective, Wang and Han name this same phenomenon “cosmetic responsiveness”, pointing out that government responses are often not born of a genuine concern for collective action or the erosion of legitimacy, but rather out of a bureaucratic need to show the image of “being responsive” to higher authorities.[7]

These two concepts, mechanical responsiveness and cosmetic responsiveness, provided a direct means of analysis to understand the reply from the Supreme People’s Court’s Research Office. What did the reply do? It acknowledged receipt of the petition, expressed that it was being taken seriously, responded item by item with the existing precedents, and promised “follow-up attention”. It precisely performed the procedural actions required by the petitioning system, with not one step more and not one step less. It was a textbook-example of closed procedure.

Selective Response: Why Will There Be No Substantial Compromise on LGBTQ Issues?

One of the core findings in the study of authoritarian responsiveness is that responsiveness is not homogeneously distributed; the state exhibits a high degree of selectivity towards different types of demands.

In his monograph Responsive Authoritarianism in China, Heurlin provides a detailed analysis of the state response mechanism in protests against land acquisition. He finds that when demands concern material interests with broad resonance (such as compensation to land acquisition or wage arrears) and can be resolved through one-off economic compensation, local and even central governments have a strong motivation to make substantive concessions.[8] Putting Heurlin’s findings and the broader document on authoritarian responsiveness together, a symmetrical pattern can be identified: when demands involve identity recognition, institutional change, or ideological adjustment, the state’s scope for compromise narrows sharply.[7:1]

The protection of the rights and interests of the LGBTQ community belongs precisely to the latter category. It is not a demand that can be “digested” by providing economic compensation or adjusting a policy parameter. It requires institutional recognition of identity, writing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” into legal texts as protected collectives, which touches upon the state’s power to define social order itself. In the Chinese political context, such demands intersect with three structural obstacles:

Firstly, the exclusion of identity politics by the “harmonious society” discourse. The framework of identity discrimination is officially categorised as “Western” and is incompatible with the “social keynote of collectivism and conciliationism”.[9] This is not merely a rhetorical gesture, but an institutional preference embedded within the logic of governance: The Chinese legal system tends to reduce issues of discrimination to civil torts that can be resolved at the individual case level, while systematically avoiding naming the structural discrimination.

Secondly, the “benefit of stability maintenance”[10] regarding LGBTQ issues is extremely low. Research by Chen, Pan, and Xu has already demonstrated that the core incentive of authoritarian responsiveness is the threat of collective action.[5:1] However, the level of organisation among LGBTQ community in China is extremely low; they lack the capacity to mobilise large-scale protests and do not constitute a destabilising factor in the evaluation of administrative performance of local officials. For a system where stability maintenance is the core performance indicator, the “benefit”, which is avoiding large-scale mass incident[11], of responding to this collective is almost zero.

The last one is risk avoidance against a backdrop of ideological tightening. Since 2016, China has continuously strengthened its control over civil society organisations, and the visibility of LGBTQ issues in public discourse has significantly diminished. In this climate, any substantial statement that goes beyond a procedural response, such as acknowledging the necessity of anti-discrimination legislation, represents a political risk for the specific departments handling such matters. Choosing the safest form of response (citing existing precedents, promising to “continue to monitor the situation”, and avoiding the creation of new obligations) is a perfectly rational bureaucratic behaviour.

The combination of these three factors points to the same conclusion: On the spectrum of authoritarian responsiveness, LGBTQ issues occupy the position that is least likely to yield substantial compromise. The state will hear and respond, but the content of that response will be strictly controlled within the confines of a closed procedure.

Historical Review: Marginalised Groups in Petitioning

This is not a unique experience of LGBTQ community. Looking back at the history of the interaction between China’s petitioning system and marginalised groups, a recurring pattern can be identified: the system “absorbs” the demands, but directs them through procedural channels that do not produce substantial changes.

The most direct reference is the HIV-infected population. In the early 2000s, after the “blood disaster”[12] in Henan was exposed, a large number of farmers who were infected with HIV through selling blood demanded compensation and medical assurance through petitioning system. Under immense international and domestic pressure, the state issued a series of responses: free antiviral treatment (so-called “Four Frees and One Care”), living aid, and specialised examination. But the operational logic behind these responses is worth a closer look. In 2005, Human Rights Watch documented in its investigative report local governments’ systematic suppression of collective rights advocacy by individuals inflected with HIV: petitioners were arrested, placed under house arrest, and intercepted, while activists who organised collective petitioning were detained; meanwhile, individual cases of financial compensation were used precisely to undermine the organisational foundation of collective action.[13] Xi Chen’s analysis of approximately one thousand collective petitioning government archives reveals the general structure of this mechanism: the petitioning system is designed to individualise collective demands, dismantling the mobilisation potential of collective action through selective concessions to individual petitioners.[14] Material issues were partially addressed, but the institutional recognition of the HIV-infected collective as a subject of rights was never achieved.

The case of religious groups shares a similarly structure. Fenggang Yang describes the religious administration system as a triple-market model: a red market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially banned religions), and a gray market (religions with an ambiguous legal/illegal status, which include a large number of house churches).[15] Religious individuals in this grey market long face a sticky situation highly similar to that of sexual minorities: while the constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief in principle, the exclusionary design of the registration system renders such guarantee unachievable in practice. The responses they receive when raising issues through petitioning follow the same standard template: reiterating constitutional principles, citing current regulations, and suggesting to resolve issues through legal registration channels, without ever addressing the structural barriers of the registration system itself.

The common structure of these cases is that the state is willing to provide limited relief at an individual-case level, but refuses to acknowledge the structural dimensions of the problem. The role played by the petitioning system in this process, in Hou’s terminology, is an emotional management apparatus for “maintaining social stability without solving problems”.[16] The response from the Supreme People’s Court’s Research Office regarding LGBTQ issues precisely replicates this pattern.

Back to the level of legal analysis, the “general personality rights” framework chosen in the Supreme Court’s response holds special functional significance in terms of political logic.

General personality rights deal with specific, provable acts of infringement committed by A against B. The implicit premise of this framework is that discrimination is individual, sporadic, and can be resolved between the two parties involved. It does not require the state to acknowledge the structural existence of discrimination, nor does it necessitate the creation of specific protected categories for LGBTQ community, nor does it require addressing institutional barriers within marriage law, the household registration system (hukou), or the healthcare system. In other words, the general personality rights framework allows the state to technically address the individual consequences of discrimination while, in principle, denying the systemic existence of discrimination. Joy Chia summarises the situation of LGBTQ community in China as one of “silence and invisibility” rather than overt homophobic violence,[17] and the general personality rights framework fits this style of governance perfectly.

This stands in fundamental contrast to the logic of anti-discrimination protections in international human rights law. The principle established by the UN Human Rights Committee in the case of Toonen v. Australia (1994) is that sexual orientation falls under the category of “status” protected by Articles 2 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and that discrimination based on sexual orientation constitutes a systemic violation of equal protection.[18] A core feature of this framework is that it identifies discrimination as a structural phenomenon requiring active state intervention, rather than merely as individual incidents to be remedied retrospectively by tort law between private parties. Although China has signed but not yet ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, this state of non-ratification is itself a form of “shelving” that has persisted for nearly thirty years.

The 2016 national survey report on China’s LGBTI community, published by the UNDP, presented the practical consequences of this “individual relief + structural absence” pattern: more than half of the respondents reported having encountered discrimination in their daily lives, with exclusion from the family being the most severe, yet the vast majority had never attempted to defend their rights through legal channels, not because they did not want to, but because no grounds could be found to cite within the existing legal framework.[19] General personality rights can theoretically cover certain extreme cases, but they cannot address this institutional exclusion that is widely spread throughout everyday life.

Re-evaluation of our Advocacy Strategies

The above analysis is not to argue that petitioning is useless, but rather that its utility needs to be precisely defined.

Within the framework of authoritarian responsiveness, the advocacy role of petitioning system for marginalised groups is primarily manifested in three dimensions:

First, the function of creating a record. Every petition record marked as “resolved” serves as a timestamped institutional trace. It proves that an issue has entered the sight of state authorities, a fact that in itself holds documentary value within international human rights review mechanisms. The detail that a response was issued by the Supreme People’s Court’s Research Office, instead of a grass-roots petition window, can be precisely cited in forums such as the UPR.

Second, the function of discourse anchoring. The existing judicial precedents cited in this response (such as the conversion “therapy” case and the employment discrimination case) were not charity from the state, but the results of the LGBTQ community embedding cases into judicial practice one after another through over a decade of influential litigation. The petitioning response gathers these scattered individual precedents into a document with an official institutional signature, granting them a form of quasi-official visibility.

Last, the function of framework diagnosis. The response explicitly chooses a general personality rights framework rather than an anti-discrimination one; this choice itself is valuable information. It tells advocates where the current boundaries of the state’s institutional imagination lie, thereby providing a basis for calibrating our strategy.

However, the common characteristic of these three functions is that they are auxiliary, not transformative. The path that can truly drive changes in judicial standards, as the experience of the past decade has proven, is still influential litigation in specific cases and the resulted accumulation of guiding cases and judicial rules. A petitioning response can record the location of the battlefield, but it cannot win the battle itself.

  1. Note added by translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petitioning_(China) ↩︎

  2. Note added by translator: for international readers, here is the background news: https://www.washingtonblade.com/2026/05/27/chinas-top-court-acknowledges-anti-lgbtq-discrimination/ . This news title is misleading, you will understand why after reading the very first part of this article. However, that is the only detailed report in English I found. By the way, for your information, Chinese LGBTQ accounts on WeChat spreading or talking about this response got suspended. ↩︎

  3. This was well explained by the Wechat Channel Zhonghe Caihong Shuo (account suspeded by the time of this translation): https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/U1VX7omSTbnMjpoBTHIt-A. This article provides a detailed analysis of the legal effect of responses to petitions, their differences from judicial interpretations, and the template-like nature of their phrasing. ↩︎

  4. Greg Distelhorst & Yue Hou, “Constituency Service under Nondemocratic Rule: Evidence from China,” The Journal of Politics 79, no. 3 (2017): 1024–1040. DOI: 10.1086/690948. ↩︎

  5. Jidong Chen, Jennifer Pan & Yiqing Xu, “Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment in China,” American Journal of Political Science 60, no. 2 (2016): 383–400. DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12207. ↩︎ ↩︎

  6. Jieren Hu, Xuan Gong & Yun Zhao, “Mechanical Responsiveness: China’s Online Petition System,” The China Quarterly 262 (2025): 293–309. DOI: 10.1017/S0305741025000220. ↩︎

  7. The judgement of that “demands on identity recognition” is not Heurlin’s direct argument, but a conclusion of multiple studies, including： Diana Fu & Greg Distelhorst, “Grassroots Participation and Repression under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping,” The China Journal 79 (2017): 100–122, which analysed the narrowing of space for civil society participation during the Xi Jinping era; and Chen, Pan, and Xu’s finding on threats of collective action as a core incentive of responsiveness, which means, on the other hand, it’s harder for a community without such capability to get a substantial response. ↩︎ ↩︎

  8. Christopher Heurlin, Responsive Authoritarianism in China: Land, Protests, and Policy Making (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Heurlin’s analysis takes protests against land acquisition as core empirical object. ↩︎

  9. This viewpoint comes from @Nevernessian’s comment to this post，stating that “discrimination based on identity is Western, and does not fit the social keynote of collectivism and conciliationism”, and differentiating the fundamental difference in legal logic between the relief to identity discrimination victims and the general protection of personality rights. ↩︎

  10. Note added by translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_maintenance ↩︎

  11. Note added by translator: Mass incident is the Chinese political language to describe large-scale protests. ↩︎

  12. Note added by translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Economy ↩︎

  13. Human Rights Watch, Restrictions on AIDS Activists in China, vol. 17, no. 5© (New York: Human Rights Watch, June 2005). Chapter 4 of the report, “Continuing Crackdown in Henan Province”, provides a detailed account of the local government’s mechanisms for intercepting, detaining, and selectively compensating HIV-inflected individuals who engage in collective petitioning. The full text can be found at: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/china0605/ ↩︎

  14. Xi Chen, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Based on approximately one thousand collective petitioning government archives, Chen analyses how the petition system structurally directs collective demands towards the handling as individual cases. See also: Carl F. Minzner, “Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal Institutions,” Stanford Journal of International Law 42 (2006): 103–179. This paper analyses how the petition system, as a “multi-functional governance tool”, encourages the individualisation of demands through institutional incentives. ↩︎

  15. Fenggang Yang, “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China,” The Sociological Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2006): 93–122. The triple-market model proposed in this paper reveals how China’s religious administration system creates boundaries between the legal and the illegal through a registration system, leaving a vast amount of religious practice in a state of institutional ambiguity. ↩︎

  16. Rui Hou, “Maintaining Social Stability without Solving Problems: Emotional Repression in the Chinese Petition System,” The China Quarterly 243 (2020): 635–654. DOI: 10.1017/S0305741019001504. ↩︎

  17. The conclusion of “silence and invisibility” pertains Joy L. Chia，quoted from: Jie Cheng, “The Legal Status of LGBTQ+ in China: A Law and Politics Perspective,” Constitutional Forum constitutionnel 32, no. 4 (2024): 31–38, DOI: 10.21991/cf29471. Cheng quoted Chia’s words： “[S]ilence and invisibility (rather than overt homophobia or anti-LGBTQ violence) define how LGBTQ individuals experience their daily lives in China.” The author of this article did not look up Chia’s original work, and followed Cheng’s quote. ↩︎

  18. UN Human Rights Committee, Toonen v. Australia, Communication No. 488/1992, CCPR/C/50/D/488/1992 (1994). This case established the precedent that sexual orientation falls under the category of “status” in Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. ↩︎

  19. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Being LGBTI in China: A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression (Beijing: UNDP, 2016) ↩︎