Picking quarrels and provoking trouble
"Picking quarrels and provoking trouble" is a criminal offence in mainland China, codified in the Criminal Law and mirrored in administrative penalties. While initially introduced as a measure to address public order offences, the charge has evolved into a versatile legal tool to deter petitioning and public participation, as well as to control speech and put out dissent. Its breadth, vagueness, and rising penalties have raised concerns in recent years, including calls from scholars and legislators for clearer thresholds, practical restraint, or even repeal.
Legal framework
Criminal Law definition
"Picking quarrels and provoking trouble" is codified in Article 293 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China, located in Section 1, "Disrupting Pubic Order", of Chapter VI, "Obstructing Administration of Public Order". Its original maximum penalty was five years imprisonment; a 2011 amendment permits up to ten years where multiple offences or "seriously disrupting public order" are found. The whole Article reads as follows:Administrative Penalties Law definition
"Picking quarrels and provoking trouble" is also regulated under the Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security. In its latest 2025 revision, which came into force on 1 January 2026, the offence is codified in Article 30 as follows:Judicial interpretations
The Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate of mainland China have issued several judicial interpretations or opinions regarding to "picking quarrels and provoking trouble".On 15 July 2013, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued the "Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Handling of Criminal Cases of Picking Quarrels and Provoking Trouble", defining "public places" as concrete physical venues—stations, docks, airports, hospitals, shopping malls, parks, theatres, exhibitions, sports fields, or similar —thereby excluding the internet; it also advised that insults or minor property damage arising from private disputes should generally be excluded from Article 293.
On 5 September 2013, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued another interpretation, titled "Interpretation on Several Issues Concerning the Application of Law in the Handling of Criminal Cases of Defamation and Other Such Crimes Involving the Use of Information Networks", extending Article 293 to certain online acts, such as "berating or intimidating others", or spreading "defaming information", and introduced a quantitative threshold whereby online defamation becomes criminal if a post is reposted 500 times or viewed 5,000 times.
On 6 February 2020, the Supreme People's Court, the Supreme People's Procuratorate, Ministry of Public Security, and Ministry of Justice issued a joint opinion, titled "Opinions on Punishing Criminal and Illegal Activities that Hinder the Prevention and Control of Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia", proposing to "severely punish" acts that "hinder epidemic control", expressly naming both "making up or intentionally spreading false information" and "picking quarrels and provoking trouble on the internet" as charge paths, and directing that non-criminal conduct be handled with administrative penalties.
Early history
From "hooliganism" to the current form
"Picking quarrels and provoking trouble" originated from the vague and capacious offence "hooliganism". Emerged in the Mao era, it was used against both perceived social ills and dissent. A 1950 Party directive defined "hooligans" as those who lived on morally questionable means without fixed residence or work and were prescribed to three years of imprisonment. It then quickly deteriorated into a flexible political charge during the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries from 1950 to 1953, when a substantial number of individuals labelled as "counterrevolutionaries" were classified as "hooligans", including former Republican officials, religious leaders, and local notables. Of the 710,000 people executed during the "counterrevolutionaries campaign", over 240,000 were put to death under the pretext of "hooliganism". After the 1957 "Anti-Rightist Campaign", "hooligans" were officially classified as "bad elements", one of the "Five Black Categories" that were considered state enemies.The 1979 Criminal Code codified "hooliganism" in Article 160 with an open‑ended "other hooligan activities" clause; crime by analogy remained permissible, thus preserving wide discretion. In the 1983–1986 "Strike Hard" campaigns, a 1984 joint interpretation expanded "other hooligan acts" to include "womanising" and "seducing foreigners", and practice reached into private morality such as dance parties and premarital sex, with mens rea diluted to "wrongful thoughts". After 4 June 1989, the label was used to jail lesser‑known protesters, illustrating its continued political pliability.
The 1997 Criminal Law abolished the offence "hooliganism" entirely, explicitly banned crime by analogy, and split the former catch‑all into five specific offences, including "picking quarrels and provoking trouble".
Early applications
Rationalisation and discipline were sought by regulators after the 1997 Criminal Law recoding. In 2008, standards were made for the clarification of the sub‑categories of this charge as well as what could be counted as "serious circumstances". During the Hu–Wen years, the charge typically targeted offline actions around 'mass incidents' rather than online speech. A noted example was the 2008 milk‑scandal campaigner Zhao Lianhai, who received two‑and‑a‑half years in 2010 after convicted for this charge. Courts might also show some restraints during this period as one case ruled by a Handan intermediate court in 2012 dismissed a ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ charge against a persistent petitioner for lack of criminal intent.Current practice
Online speech inclusion and early crackdowns
On 19 August 2013, during a national propaganda work conference, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping reportedly warned that ‘a small group of reactionary intellectuals’ were using the internet to ‘spread rumours’, ‘attack Party leadership’, and ‘smear the socialist system’, and thus must be ‘strictly punished’. On the same day, the Beijing police detained online microblogger Qin Huohuo and Lierchaisi, labelling them as rumour-makers who ‘fabricated news’, ‘distorted facts’, and ‘created incidents online’. Soon after, in September 2013, Yang Zhong, a 16-year-old from Zhangjiachuan, Gansu, was detained for seven days on suspicion of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ after questioning the police’s account of a karaoke club manager’s death. This became two notable prelude cases prior to the September 2013 interpretation that issued by the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate that expanded the scope of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ to online speech and thus laid the legal basis for prosecutions in the subsequent broader rumour crackdown. Qin was eventually sentenced to three years in prison on 17 April 2014 for slander and ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, consolidating that social media posts alone could constitute the offence.Concurrently, since the abolition of the extrajudicial ‘re-education through labour’ system in 2013, there has been an observed increase in the use of criminal detention under charges including ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ to silence activists, petitioners, and civil society figures. Rights activist Cao Shunli, detained in September 2013 and later charged with this offence, died in custody in March 2014 after being denied timely medical care, underscoring the charge’s use to hold dissidents in prolonged detention with harsh conditions.
In May 2014, as the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown drew nearer, dozens of noted individuals were detained on public-order charges such as ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ amid a wide-ranging security clampdown. Notably, human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang was arrested after attending a private Tiananmen memorial seminar and was eventually charged solely based on seven of his postings on Weibo from 2011–2014. Pu was put on trial in late 2015 as prosecutors built the case entirely on his social media posts, and he was convicted of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ with a three-year suspended sentence.
Gradually widened use across fields
The scope of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ continued to expand as part of a broader, hardline turn under the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping. It was gradually becoming an excessively flexible tool to suppress activism across fields.Notable crackdowns in 2015 included the ‘Feminist Five’ who were first pre-emptively detained in March under the charge of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, before being released on bail a month later. Then on 9 July 2015, an unprecedented nationwide sweep of human-rights lawyers and legal activists—later known as the ‘709 crackdown’—saw over 200 individuals detained or questioned within days, many were initially held under ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ or related public-order charges, with some were later escalated to ‘subversion’ charges.
In Xinjiang, a Human Rights Watch report revealed that from 2016 to 2018, ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ was one of the vague and broad charges commonly used to convict Uyghurs and Kazakhs for behaviour that did not constitute a genuine criminal offence, with 87 per cent of 2017 sentences exceeding five years. Testimonies from Xinjiang also described rapid trials and coerced confessions. The later leaked Xinjiang police files saw the charge being used as a tool for long-term incarceration, with highlit cases including Memetali Abdureshid, who was sentenced to 15 years and 11 months for ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ and ‘preparing to carry out terrorist activities’, and farmer Nurmemet Dawut, received 11 years for ‘gathering the public to disturb social order’ and ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’.
Petitioners continued to be prominent targets of this charge. Courts and police in multiple provinces used the charge to respond to petition-related collective actions, including petitioning in Beijing or simply to higher-level authorities, or, as seen in one case in 2019, where petitioning in a ‘non-designated location’ was framed as ‘creating disorder in a public place’ and therefore constituted ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’.
Online speech was suppressed even beyond the open feed, as remarks posted in chat groups and semi-private digital spaces were also targeted by this charge. Cases in September 2017 saw brief detentions under ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ for ‘insulting’ police checks by a WeChat post or sharing a joke about a senior government official in a WeChat group of less than 500 members; by 2018, reports saw Twitter users in mainland China were given warnings, pressured to post/account deletions, or even landed with detentions under this charge. A crowdsourced spreadsheet compiled by an anonymous activist has documented cases in mainland China from 2013 onwards where people were punished for their online and offline remarks, based on publicly available court records and police notices; by May 2022, the spreadsheet had grown to roughly 2,300 entries, including over 100 tied to Twitter activity, many involving criminal charges like ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’.
On the ground, unapproved religious gatherings and symbolic acts were deemed disorderly or offensive and therefore can be prosecuted with or administratively penalised under this charge, as one case in 2018 saw the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, while its pastor, Wang Yi, was later escalated to ‘inciting subversion’ and ‘illegal business operations’ charges, the church’s congregants and organisers were detained and questioned under ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’; symbolic moves like slapping a police dummy, expressing affection for Japan, wearing ‘inappropriate’ cosplay attire, placing memorial tablets in a temple for Japanese war criminals, or publicly staging a bondage roleplay scene, can be branded as creating a ‘vicious’ social impact, and therefore ended with this charge criminally or administratively.
During the ‘Sweeping away the Black and Eliminating the Evil’ special campaign, it is recorded that in 2019 alone, 21,546 ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’ cases were logged, approximately taking up 20 per cent of the year’s total. Defence attorneys estimated that around 70–80% of their clients charged during the campaign would likely not have been charged outside of it.
During the 2020 Inner Mongolia protests against a new policy reducing Mongolian language instruction, local public security bureaus opened cases and published suspect lists for offences including ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’; in Horqin district, one such list contained 129 people.