‘There was no mercy at all’: Hooliganism,homosexuality and the opening-up of China

Introduction

Soon the Big Arrests began. … Some lost their job for life because of this. Some were sentenced to very serious punishment, some were even sentenced to death. (Director Du)

You would be sentenced and there was no mercy at all; at that time, I tell you, it was the worst (moment) in China. (Dr Chen)

Although homosexuality in itself was never a crime in the new China ¹ (see Bakken, 1993; Guo, 2007; Wu, 2003), not even during the Maoist period, homosexual men have been stigmatised, denounced and imprisoned (Jones, 2007; Li, 2002; Pan, 2006), being subjected to varying forms of moral and often extra-legal sanctions (see Li, 2006). Sex between men has been viewed as unnatural and degenerate, and condemned as ‘a physical and psychological “perversion” (bantai) and “violation of nature”, if not simply an “abysmal crime” ’ (Evans, 1997: 52). For example, Liu argues that ‘homosexuality is unnatural and is against the normal biological and psychological human development. They [homosexuals] are facing a lot of social, moral, legal, economic and etiological problems and have serious consequences’ (Liu, 1988: 87, trans. Kong, 2016).

Many writers describe the emergence out of the terrible years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the opening-up of China in the early 1980s (Van de Werff, 2010; Xiao et al., 2011) as a time when homosexual men no longer had to hide, gay identities were allowed the freedom to blossom and gay communities came into their own. One of the best examples of this literature is Wu’s (2003) article, ‘From “long yang” and “dui shi” to tongzhi: Homosexuality in China’. Wu argues that the years from 1949 to the late 1970s were ‘the dark ages’ for homosexual men: ‘homosexual behaviour … served as grounds for persecution during Chinese political upheavals between the 1950s and 1970s’ (2003: 117). And there is no doubt that, although sex was not taboo, during the post-liberation years of the 1950s and early 1960s a correct code of sexual and gender norms (Gold, 1985) was emphasised in the state discourse on sexuality. Within that discourse, the representation of homosexuality was largely absent (Evans, 1995) in an effective erasure and exclusion of homosexual Chinese men from the picture of a healthy state.

There has been a tendency to take a teleological view of homosexuality in post-liberation China, whereby the period of liberation is associated with the repression of homosexuality and the end of the liberation period marks the end of the oppression of gay men. That is, while homosexuality was tolerated in traditional China (Hinsch, 1990), liberation brought with it ‘a puritanical, if not heavy-handed sexual prudery’ (Pan, 2006: 2). Wu argues that ‘in the 1980s, the Chinese government’s “open door” policy made it possible for the Chinese gay community to develop’ (2003: 117). Some authors have then contrasted an absolutely repressive and criminalising Maoist past with a more enlightened era in the 1980s, wherein homosexual love could be more freely expressed and the emergence of Chinese ‘gay identities’ and community became possible (see Jeffreys, 2006; Rofel, 2007: 86). In contrast to this view, we have argued elsewhere (Worth et al., 2017) that while many homosexual men were repressed during the Cultural Revolution, the breaking down of Chinese society (in particular, the dislocation from home and family that occurred when youth were sent to work in the countryside) provided the opportunity and freedom for some young men to not only discover their homosexuality, but also to form intimate and often enduring relationships with other men.

This article challenges the particular idea that the opening-up period from 1978 to 1985 was actually a positive period for homosexual men. In fact, based on oral history interviews with Chinese gay men who lived through that period, we argue that the so-called opening-up of China gave birth to one of the darkest periods in the lives of Chinese homosexual men. While homosexuality was not criminalised, we show how the ‘crime’ of hooliganism enacted against homosexual men during the Cultural Revolution was also re-enacted in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

At the same time, we examine the legal (and moral) underpinnings of hooliganism in China in a sociological frame. Unlike Max Weber (1978 [1968]), who held that the law should be free from the influence of moral values, Zymunt Bauman’s sociological work contends that the law and morality can never be separated. Bauman argues that the concern for morality, law and order ‘signals, as a rule, that not everything is as it should be. … [The concern is] born of that sense of (rectifiable) imperfection, and of the urge to do something about it’ (2000: 206).

In post-liberation China, distinctions were made between ‘antagonistic contradictions’ between the people and the enemy (capitalists) and non-antagonistic contradictions within the people. Contradictions within the people were to be dealt with by persuasion and education (Clarke and Feinerman, 1995: 136), and a wide range of ‘administrative’ punishments came into being to this effect. One such contradiction was hooliganism. Following Bauman, then, we find, in the strenuous (re)enactment of laws against hooliganism during the initial post-liberation decade, a sense that the Chinese social and public order was under threat and the state was engaging in efforts to prevent disarray and put the (Chinese) world to rights. This process, of ensuring social order, operates to exclude those who are disordered, who do not conform, and who disrupt. And this exclusion has a moral element to it – it is a matter of righteousness and public virtue. ² As the criteria for exclusion function both to determine definitions of decency and to enforce standards of behaviour, they involve the attribution of immorality. And for Bauman, writing about the carceral nature of American law, to arrest and to separate those who are difficult to control has been ‘over the centuries, almost a visceral, instinctual fashion of responding to all difference and particularly such difference that could not be, or was not wished to be, accommodated within the web of habitual social intercourse’ (2000: 208).

In this light, the application of charges of hooliganism, particularly to homosexual men charged with hooligan offences, exemplifies Bauman’s ideas on the exclusion of certain kinds of people in a carceral state. In China, the term ‘hooligan’ is generally a political or moral assessment of a person. In ancient China, the word mang in the term liumang referred to ‘people from elsewhere’, ‘people from the wilderness’ and ‘village inhabitants’ (Ge, 1995). Liumang (hooligan) came into use in connection with local riffraff and scoundrels, and in the 19th century came to mean a specific type of bad element, such as ‘the rootless rowdies and criminals who plagued the port city of Shanghai’ (Tanner H, 2000: 6). In the criminal law of the republican period (1912–1949), liumang remained an informal term for a group of people who were often arrested and charged with a variety of offences that evidenced their unfitness for decent society and who were thus considered to be agents of social disorder. And, as we shall argue, the same moral underpinning has been integrated into the laws concerning hooliganism in the People’s Republic.

The law, morality and hooliganism in China

Traditionally, Qing law was what Ruskola calls ‘a moral code’ (1994: 2531). The law tended to be aspirational declarations of ideological principles. Yet, at the same time, these norms were a tool of social control harnessed to serve hierarchical Confucian values. Ruskola argues (1994: 2532):

As a consequence of its moral nature, the law had to be relatively open-ended and flexible; two special devices, catch-all provisions and the analogy, evolved to ensure that any colorably immoral behavior was indeed punishable.

Although the law of the People’s Republic of China bears little resemblance to that of the Qing dynasty, the underlying conception of law and its social function is in many ways similar, and is still underpinned by a socialist morality. Ruskola contends that, just as in the Qing period, the law, and its application, in the People’s Republic have developed in a manner that has enabled legal provisions ‘to remain open-ended in order to provide a broad enough umbrella to cover all possible violations of the official morality’ (1994: 2537).

According to Smith (1998), there were significant continuities between the Qing law and the Confucian past and the moral concerns of Mao Zedong’s period and the years that followed. In post-liberation legal theory and practice, hooligans were viewed as elements of a counter-revolutionary movement that refused to repent after repeated education. Communist Party policy and national legislation had both stipulated resolute struggle against these elements of society. During the democratic reform carried out in the early period of the People’s Republic, a campaign was launched to crack down on hooligans and bandits. Hooligans were targeted as recalcitrant to rehabilitation such that Mao himself pointed out that leadership must be exercised against them. In his article ‘The situation in the summer of 1957’ (Mao, 1977), he reiterated that hooligans must be brought to justice. In the 1957 version of the law, hooligans could be punished only if they had been warned on previous occasions. However, in 1962, this proviso was removed. This led to a need to speed up legislation. Draft guiding principles for China’s new Criminal Law in 1954 stated: ‘Hooligan elements (liumang fenzi) who do not engage in honest work but gather to gamble, traffic in people, insult women, corrupt youth or otherwise disrupt public order shall be sentenced to up to five years of fixed-term imprisonment, life imprisonment, or death’ (Tanner H, 2000: 11).

Thus, hooliganism became part of the legal catch-all provisions (see Finkelstein, 1968) in China, proscribing acts contrary to the social and public order. The legal concept of hooliganism was further developed as an administrative category before it was concretised in law. And, in fact, the criminal offence of hooliganism was not formally defined in Chinese law until 1979 (Tanner H, 2000), and it only stayed on the statute books until 1997, when it was removed as an offence in and of itself. Before that time, the concept of hooliganism referred to a range of anti-social and immoral acts. Behaviours defined as hooliganism were punishable as anti-state offences, and subject to administrative sanctions and punishments.

In effect, hooligans were little different from the ‘vicious scoundrels’ targeted in statutes that operated in the Qing period. From the start, it was understood that the problem of hooliganism lay in its impact on social order rather than on individuals: it denoted ‘the use of cruel or base means to destroy the public order’ (Changchun, 1990, cited in Tanner H, 2000: 12). The crime of hooliganism was premised on the offender gaining pleasure from some sort of shameless act that violated the moral principles of Chinese society, and it was irrelevant whether that act was committed in public or in private. And, as Dikötter argues (1997: 159), from the 1950s, connections were made between hooliganism and sexuality:

Hooliganism generally referred to anti-social acts such as disorderly conduct, looking for fights, making trouble or insulting people, but it could also refer to sexual offences such as harassing or assaulting women. The boundaries between indecency and hooliganism (liumang) were often vague.

From the beginning of the People’s Republic, a wide variety of sexual behaviour cases fell into the category of offences which included hooliganism – some were very minor (premarital or extramarital relations, dance parties with the lights off, using obscene language and seducing foreigners) and others were more serious (pornography, sexual harassment, under-age sex and non-consensual sodomy) (Tanner H, 2000) – while other serious sexual crimes were dealt with under other legal provisions. In effect, much of the concern was around prostitution. ³ In the early years post-liberation, the state claimed that commercial sex had been almost completely eradicated (Zhang, 2006) because prostitutes had been transformed into ‘new persons’ (Ruan, 1991), and because the need for covert sexual outlets had been abolished through the process of the ‘renunciation of the heart’ that the state required of its subjects (cf. Gil, 1992). In reality, there was a state-sanctioned crackdown on brothels and forced rehabilitation of sex workers. According to Zhang (2006), on 21 November 1949, all the brothels in Beijing were closed down in one evening. This crackdown on prostitution was vindicated as punishment of those who willingly went against propriety and the social good – namely, pimps and traffickers (Liu, 1988; Yu, 1988). Sentences for offences against the state could range from several days of detention to up to seven years of imprisonment (Wu, 2003). This act of incarcerating, or separating from society, the hooligan who poses a threat to the social order is, according to Bauman (2000: 213), ‘an effective method to neutralize the threat, or at least to calm the anxiety which that threat evokes’. As we will show in this article, the development and application of offences of hooliganism were an explicit demonstration of implicit People’s Republic state policy on same-sex relationships. Homosexuality was positioned as a type of hooliganism and, as such, as a social evil that should be handled by ‘ideological education, administrative disciplinary action, security punishment, and education through labor’ (Ge, 1995: 71). The first crackdown on homosexuality (and, in particular, sodomy) that resulted in criminal charges began in the Cultural Revolution (see Li, 2006: 85). Homosexual men were regularly arrested under Article 106 of Chinese Criminal Law – which included prohibitions against hooliganism – although hooliganism was not in itself a criminal offence (Ruan, 1991: 3; see also Chou, 2000; Geyer, 2003; Li, 1977).

Similarly to hooliganism, the concept of ‘re-education through labour’ has never been clearly and officially defined in China. It has three key elements: it is compulsory; it is an administrative measure; and it is used to deal with ‘contradictions within the people’ (see Clarke and Feinerman, 1995) – that is, individual behaviours and beliefs that contradict or are irreconcilable with the party ethos. Of course, this last element harks back again to the idea of state-sanctioned morality. Re-education through labour (laojiao) arose in the 1950s as an administrative punishment imposed by the police, bypassing the criminal justice system and summarily subjecting a person guilty of minor offences to a maximum of three years’ incarceration (Fu, 2005: 811); the reform process took place through collective labour. Since its inception in 1955, re-education through labour has become a convenient instrument for the government to use to deal with some ‘hooligan’ activities. Initially, laojiao was used as a comparatively mild suppression of counter-revolutionary activities and served as a useful instrument of punishment for dissenting intellectuals (Fu, 2005). In the first institution built for re-education through labour between 1957 and 1960, nearly 2000 inmates were given re-education through labour sentences for hooliganism (Fu, 2005: 815). It began to be phased out during the radical years of the Cultural Revolution because its commitment to rehabilitation was considered to be soft on, or even aiding, the enemy. However, it remained a convenient catch-all for homosexual activity during that period and served as a mechanism for disciplining those men who, through their sexual activity, were considered to constitute a disturbance of the social public order. By the late 1970s, the numbers in re-education through labour had begun to increase dramatically (Fu, 2005). As part of this expansion, many homosexual men were rounded up in crackdowns that were undertaken in the name of maintaining public order and morality.

Methods

The article is born out of a joint collaboration between researchers at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It grew out of an understanding that the history of homosexuality in the early years after the liberation in 1949 had not been written. Using an oral history method, the study aimed to collect memories of Chinese homosexual men about their evolving social and sexual life in four cities in China since the founding of the People’s Republic, by mapping the men’s lives against key elements of China’s recent history.

Data collection occurred in 2012 and 2013. Older homosexual men were recruited through snowball sampling from the four cities. While the men (all of whom were aged between 65 and 83 years) who were interviewed now live in urban settings, some of them had come from rural areas. The men talked at length (often in two interviews) about their lives in the context of historical changes in the society around them. The 31 interviews were conducted in Mandarin by female Chinese scholars. They were transcribed and returned to the men for checking and discussion, and then translated into English. Ethics approval for the project was obtained from the University of New South Wales and Tsinghua University. The men in our study, born prior to liberation, lived through enormous social, economic and political changes in Chinese society, from collectivisation, to the Cultural Revolution, to the opening up of China and the burgeoning of a gay community in the late 1980s and onwards.

We chose to carry out the interviews as oral histories (rather than thematic interviews) in order to illuminate historical events through personal stories. Oral history was chosen because it allows a systematic collection and preservation of living people’s testimony about their own experiences – a re-visioning of history. In oral history, an individual addresses their own experiences and feelings in narrative form as an ‘eyewitness account’. Oral history elucidates the historical significance of personal experience, as well as the personal impact of historical matters (Portelli, 2005). Although Xinran (2009: 1) contends that, for Chinese people, ‘it is not easy to speak openly and publicly about what we truly think and feel’, on the whole, the men in our study did not hold back about their sexuality, the hardships they had endured in their lives, and the repression of homosexuality by the Chinese state. The men’s own expressed desire to share their stories of events and loves that had to be lived unspoken is part of what drives this article. The oral historian Gail Hershatter (2002: 44) writes about the time after liberation as one in which the ‘space of the Chinese nation was finally to be stabilised – its borders mapped and protected, its interior evenly governed by a Party/State’. She submits that, as oral life narratives are both an addition and an antidote to those understandings of history that have been limited to the documentation of officialdom and to geographic and political states, they constitute an important historical source. Using oral history as a source ‘requires a consideration of both stories and silences, of memories and forgettings’ (Hershatter, 2002: 44). As sociologists, our use of oral history in this study is not simply a recording and recounting of the voices of these old Chinese homosexual men; it is an active ‘sociological’ interpretation, a ‘making sense’ of their stories in the context of the structural violence that has marked Chinese society since 1949.

In this article, we challenge the received wisdom that the ‘opening-up’ of China in the late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in new freedoms that improved the lives of homosexual men in China. The narratives of the men we interviewed evidence the ways in which the state cracked down on homosexuality during the reform period in an attempt to impose a heteronormative social order on the Chinese people. It is a testament to those men that the attempts to stamp out the ‘hooligan’ nature of homosexuality were abject failures. The men in our study managed to meet each other for sex and formed deep and permanent relationships under the most difficult of circumstances. The new burgeoning Chinese gay community did not spring out of a newly permissive Chinese soil like a mushroom; it was nurtured through the most desperate of times by men like those in our study.

Hooliganism and homosexuality during the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was ‘a period categorised by a profound conflation of political and sexual impurity’ (Honig, 2003: 149). State policy was extremely antagonistic towards homosexuality as something that was seen to be bourgeois, decadent and unnatural, and the Red Guards initiated attacks on homosexuals as part of broader political attacks on class enemies. Homosexuals were subject to many extralegal sanctions (Li, 2006). The homosexual became a kind of criminal or ‘class enemy’ and – together with rich peasants, rightists and landlords – homosexuals were classified as ‘bad elements’ (Geyer, 2003). As well, the regulation of same-sex sexuality relied on arbitrary administrative and disciplinary sanctions and punishments (Zheng, 2014).

BJ, one of our interviewees, remembers that during the Cultural Revolution, the negative social environment meant that men were charged with the crime of hooliganism:

Quite a few these old tongzhi [gay men] were re-educated through labour because of it. … For example, an old tongzhi was denounced in our factory. He was over 70 years old. He didn’t do sodomy, but had oral sex with young fellows. He was denounced for hooliganism. After being denounced, he felt ashamed to be alive.

Many other men in our study also have vivid memories of the denunciation of homosexual men. Local state agents (mainly police) propagated informal policies around appropriate revolutionary sexuality, and they arrested and punished those who violated these codes. Many of the men we interviewed who faced the worst persecution were artists and cultural professionals who were stopped from working. For example, Mr Peng was interrogated many times during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard accused him and his lover of being:

‘Monsters and demons. Hooligans and sodomites. Criminals’. But they didn’t have any evidence; they just wanted you to confess. But I didn’t. … People from the Sichuan Opera Troupe were all walked around the South Avenue in one big circle. They wore signs which said ‘hooligan’ or ‘hooligan and sodomite’, during the walk around the street. These were written by the Red Guards.

Lubman argues that the law was ‘politicized into irrelevance during the Cultural Revolution’ (1995: 1) and that re-education through labour languished (Berman et al., 1982: 257). Our interviewees had an experience that was different from this. According to them, many homosexual men were sentenced to re-education through labour. For example, Master Li was arrested in 1968 and charged with sodomy. He received a four-year sentence of re-education through labour.

I was denounced by a gay mate. … He denounced me and I admitted [it]. … I had to admit it; I was timid. It was just during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, people might say this [person] was a rogue and evildoer, and the person would be picked up and denounced. Anyway, I was denounced. Our unit held a meeting and I stood in the centre [of the meeting room] and received their judgement. I was denounced once or twice and they said I was a bugger; I also felt disgraced and embarrassed myself. There were so many people and they wore white armbands saying ‘rogue’ in black letters. I just stood there with a bowed head. The staff of our unit denounced me all together.

Men who had been imprisoned had a rough road after release. Many had lost their jobs and their marriages. Mr Peng talks about the deleterious effect that imprisonment had on his lover, Deng, who never regained his status as a famous actor in the opera:

My boyfriend was also angry. Ah! He drank and drank wine; and didn’t care about anything, [not even] his voice. He also smoked. … He wasn’t originally a smoker and became one after the Cultural Revolution. He looked after himself very well previously. After the Cultural Revolution, he began to eat everything. It was the Cultural Revolution that surely had some psychological impact on him.

Despite being frequently described as heralding a new era of social permissiveness and individual liberties in China, the end of the Cultural Revolution did not spell the end of social disapprobation and repression of homosexuality. As Wu argues, over the next decade, as the government rehabilitated people who had been persecuted, homosexual men were not afforded the same treatment (Wan, cited in Wu, 2003: 124). In most cities, men met in secret and did not dare to make their homosexuality public. Boliang Yin argues: ‘At that time, there were no [gay] clubs or other organisations. We were underground – like guerrillas.’ The men in our study also continued to conduct their sexual and love lives covertly. They would use false names and never give any of their sexual partners any information about themselves in case they were found out. Yanyuan told us:

In that era, people couldn’t accept homosexuality and just discriminated against us. I kept my secret strictly, it was impossible to talk to others; although I was aware [of my homosexuality], I dared not talk to others. The topic was rarely talked about at that time; occasionally someone said ‘the hooligan, abnormal and freak’. At that time, there weren’t even specific words.

Many of our interviewees had married women, and some had subsequently divorced. Most had clandestine relationships with other men. Life consisted of finding sexual partners at dances or in specific bathing pools or toilets. Master Li said:

In those [gay] circles, I had no particularly good personal friendship. If we kept a good relationship, we would say Hello when we met on the street. If we had a sexual relationship, we would hold hands and even hug when we met; sometimes, we could also kiss or touch each other’s face. Later in the eras, it seemed that we all went to the Common Bathing Pool at East Street. At that time [in the 1980s], there were such common bathing pools which still exist. I also went to another city to find sexual partners.

While many relationships were fleeting and purely sexual in nature, some men had longer-term relationships. However, as Master Xu told us, there were great difficulties in maintaining a long-term homosexual relationship under these conditions:

Few boyfriends could stay in a relationship with me for a long time. … I would avoid deeper relationships. Deeper relationships would cause a lot of problems and even hurt the two of us. However, I always longed for such a relationship. But, I was unwilling to commit to a casual relationship.

Reform, homosexuality and hooliganism

[T]hings became a little disordered, somewhat crazy; and a little casual about safety and confidentiality. (Mr Liu)

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping initiated dramatic economic, political and social reform, and an opening-up of China to the rest of the world. Much has been written about the positive achievements of the reform period in China. But there is a darker side. Alongside the sweeping reforms, including the urgent reform of the Chinese economy through the Four Modernisations (of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology), was a drive for moral and ethical progress: ‘we must build a high level of socialist, spiritual civilisation’ (Deng, 1993: 208). There was, Tanner argues, a moral dimension to Deng’s demand for modernisation and reform. In 1979, Deng had called for the advancement of a spiritual socialism for China, which was defined in moral terms (Tanner H, 2000: 4) and became a crusade for the moral regeneration of Chinese society. Deng’s regime was concerned with a morality that was rooted in Confucian thought (Smith, 1998). There was a need to re-create the boundary between moral and immoral behaviour that had been blurred by the social changes that had begun to envelope China. The offensive against spiritual pollution was aimed at social morals and operationalised through a wide variety of techniques, such as campaigns and mass movements, including use of the criminal justice system.

It was in this zeitgeist that the offence of hooliganism became a law in 1979. The formalising of laws against liumangzui was part and parcel of the attempt to construct this spiritual/moral socialist civilisation. In the beginning, the category of hooliganism was considered to be a means to reform and rehabilitate counter-revolutionaries. It was, at first, limited to those who were not convicted of a criminal offence and who were to be supervised by the police within the community. The concept of hooliganism was not limited to public acts, however, and was applied to private and intimate behaviours as well. As such, it was an obvious tool for the regulation of sexuality at that time.

There were three categories of hooliganism: violence, troublemaking and sexual offences. A wide variety of sexual behaviours and issues fell into that third category – pornography, group sex, sexual harassment, prostitution and obscene language. Although the law did not address premarital sex directly, the ‘hooliganism’ provisions of the Criminal Law, for example, covered premarital sexual experimentation. In the 1980s, security patrols even policed city parks on the lookout for unmarried couples making use of secluded spots to engage in sexual activities, reprimanding if not arresting any who were caught (Ruskola, 1994: 2554).

In a few Chinese cities, prior to the crackdown on homosexuality as hooliganism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, public baths and other venues, as well as dances, had briefly opened up for gay men. Director Du remembers that, at the beginning of the reform era, there were big stadiums and parks where large dances were held:

We danced there at the time, turned off the lights and danced in the darkness, men and women, men and men … all kinds of girls; some for money, some just because they felt like it. … At the time, there were all sorts of messy relationships … you slept with anyone and anything was possible …

Mr Peng’s colleagues said to him: ‘Peng, the Cultural Revolution has gone, and our country is liberated and open to the world. You don’t need to be so hard at work all day long. Just go out and have fun.’ While Wu (2003: 127) has claimed that ‘[f]rom the 1980s to the mid-1990s, the most common punishment for gay men was not legal but administrative within the workplace’, this was not the case for the men in our study who remember arrests – and worse – for homosexual activity, which they claimed was particularly targeted. Director Du told us that as soon as ‘the Big Arrests began, [a friend] who was heavily involved in running dances was arrested and imprisoned together with lots of others. My friend was among them. Goodness me! She was shot!’ In fact, the Strike Hard Blows campaign (discussed below) spun out of control very quickly and resulted in around 10,000 executions in three and a half years (Tanner MS, 2000: 94).

While there was legal disagreement about whether the crimes around homosexual acts had to involve sex with underage boys, or non-consensual sex, or simply sex with a man, in order to satisfy a ‘warped sexual appetite’, the reality was that homosexual sex in general was marked as a hooligan act. Mr Huang and Mr Peng both recall that around 1978, gay men began to be arrested. While consensual sodomy was not a criminal offence Mr Huang went on to say:

If they were considered to be committing a serious crime, they would be investigated further. They would be detained even when the investigation was finished, and then it was called criminal detention. Sometimes, administrative detention and criminal detention were posted in newspapers. I remember that … sodomy offenders received re-education through labour for one to five years.

The offence of hooliganism was used as an instrument to regulate and punish sex between men, both public and private. According to Tanner (Tanner H, 2000: 14), ‘activities in private could be prosecuted as hooliganism because the concept of “public order” was understood to include the moral principles of the community’. The authorities were determined to make clear the boundary between the morality of heterosexuality and the immorality of homosexuality.

The Strike Hard Blows campaign

In late spring of 1983, what Tanner (Tanner MS, 2000: 93) calls ‘the bloodiest campaign in post-Mao Chinese politics’ was launched nationwide. This was named the ‘Campaign to Strike Hard Blows Against Serious Criminal Offending’. The campaign reflected the leadership’s deep fear that it was losing the fight for social order, and its belief that a show of force was needed to deter criminals and to gain public support against the growth in social liberalism and the polluting ideas of the West. Though the campaign was particularly aimed at serious criminal offences – such as murder, rape, robbery and bombing – many of the mass arrests that followed were actually for sexual offending. H Tanner argues that ‘[i]t seems reasonable to speculate that the moral witch-hunting atmosphere created by the anti-spiritual pollution campaign may have focused the attention of the police, the procurates and the courts on “licentious” hooliganism’ (Tanner H, 2000: 21).

On 2 November 1984, in a document titled ‘Solutions to Issues of the Specific Application of Laws Concerning Present Cases’, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate made judicial interpretation of the ‘other hooligan actions’ in Article 160 of the Criminal Law. It specified the ‘other hooligan actions’ that constituted the crime of hooliganism by listing items relating to sodomy: ‘sodomy of infants, sodomy of juveniles by force, repeated violent sodomy and threatening ways under criminal circumstances’. While this interpretation obviously did not apply to consensual sexual acts between adult men, homosexual men were still charged and found guilty of the crime of hooliganism, and hence the article was used to target homosexuality. Alongside this criminalisation of homosexual acts through the application of hooliganism was the definition of homosexuality as a psychological illness in the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders (third edition).

Many of the interviewees remember the severe measures that were taken. According to Director Du, these were driven by an extreme leftist policy carried out by the state. Large groups of gay ‘hooligans’ were reported and hundreds of people were arrested. Master Xu states: ‘The gays were arrested by the police. At that time, we did not realise the severity of the large arrests that happened in 1983, which was part of a unified and political movement nationwide.’ According to Mr Liu, the police obtained the addresses of gay men through informers and forced confessions naming sexual partners. After one person was arrested, another was uncovered – and then hundreds. Seven of our interviewees were arrested during the Strike Hard Blows campaign in 1983. Director Du describes being hunted and detained:

[One night], the police wagon zoomed past, they would go around once every evening. I was terrified and looked for shelter everywhere, but I was arrested at last. … They took me to the police station on the first day. … If you did not confess, they would beat you, really beat you – give you a big slap, kick you and make you know they were fierce and admit [the crime]. While beating and kicking you, they would ask, ‘Did this [homosexual] affair exist? Will you admit or not?’ Things were like this; it was very dark in the police station at that time. They handcuffed and put me on the train for more than 10 hours. I was taken directly to the detention house and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Mr Ding describes being forced to confess and remembers being lucky to escape incarceration:

In 1983, the police talked with me and asked me to answer questions about what kind of relationship did I have with people. It was in the winter of 1983, perhaps October or November that year, Chengdu city took these arrests seriously and made homosexuality the main crime. The police compelled people to betray each other. … I was forced to confess. I did have sex with that person. This lasted for at least several hours and I confessed at last but was not penalised. … Afterwards, I heard from the security guard of our unit that my unit had protected me as I was helping with production management. I was a lucky dog, or else I would have been jailed for three years.

Even though not all men who were arrested for hooliganism were sent for labour reform, their crimes were posted on street corners. Because of this, many of those who were not imprisoned lost their jobs. The campaign also had a short-term effect on the gay community. Around the time of the crackdowns, it became very difficult for the men to meet each other (particularly in Chengdu, the ‘gay capital’ of China), as the venues moved to more remote areas away from the purview of the public security forces.

Re-education through labour

As part of the drive for spiritual renewal, not only did hooliganism have to be deterred, but those engaged in it had to be rooted out and severely punished. Fu Hualing (2005) argues that re-education through labour was a convenient instrument for the Chinese state to deal with rapid social change and a perceived rise in criminal activity. The state feared that sweeping socio-economic changes were weakening earlier communitarian social control mechanisms. In 1979, the party leadership embarked on legal reform, including the restoration of administrative detention and re-education through labour. New rules were enacted and the 1980 Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China allowed administrative detention to be imposed in lieu of criminal sanctions for minor crimes. Thus, the focus of re-education through labour was shifted to people who committed minor criminal offences and its punitive function became more apparent. In 1982, offenders who committed minor criminal offences were convicted of hooliganism crimes. Education and reform became compulsory means of handling ‘contradictions among the people’ (Mao, 1977; see also Fu, 2005: 819), and Zou Keyuan (2001: 463) states that underlying the policy of re-education through labour was ‘education, help to change by persuasion or other means (ganhua), and redemption’ (emphasis added). In practice, for gay men it was simply the punishment and deterrence of homosexual activity through imprisonment in exactly the same way as for other crimes.

The numbers and types of offences (particularly immoral acts) for which re-education for labour could be imposed increased, the regulations expanded, and the numbers of people incarcerated grew vastly. In the period between 1978 and 1983 (the years in which most of our interviewees were arrested and imprisoned), the numbers rose from 70,233 in 1978 to 2,200,000 in 1983 (cited in Fu, 2005: 822). As Fu argues, ‘[i]n sum, it is used as a key device to maintain social order and stability’ (2005: 824).

Of the seven men in our study who were arrested, only one escaped detention. All the others spent between three and five years in prison. Director Du describes a certain bewilderment about the speed and extent of the round-ups, as hardly anyone escaped arrest:

The friends who played around were all sent to prison, overnight they were all in prison – how did the public security bureau get hold of so much information? Once one was arrested, everyone else was charged with similar [crimes]. … The punishment was huge, put forward by Deng Xiaoping – punishment should be rapid and severe.

As Director Du pointed out, the punishments were harsh. According to Master Li, three years’ imprisonment for homosexuality could be considered getting off lightly:

Since I defended myself well, I was only sentenced to three years in jail for the crime of hooliganism. The reason for this was that the man [who had sex with me] didn’t report me to the police. It seemed that three years was short. Some people were sentenced to five or seven years in jail. It is history now. I didn’t keep this matter in my heart during the past 20 or 30 years.

Like Master Li, Boliang Yin also described the manner in which lovers were pressed to denounce one another, and he was reported by his boyfriend. Boliang did not blame him personally:

I was arrested and charged with hooliganism. The person that dobbed me in was my boyfriend, Gao. I couldn’t complain, I just had to accept it. He was also arrested and we did reform through labour together.

Few of the men describe their time in prison. It is something they want to forget. All homosexual men were under attack in the Strike Hard Blows campaign and there was some kind of acceptance of it. Director Du talks about working in a factory, manufacturing automobiles alongside other men who were not prisoners and making friends with them:

We could chat and be companions. There were also some workers in the prison, they had been put into this prison before. Sometimes, when we would like to buy some delicious food, we would ask the workers to bring something from outside and we ate it secretly. There were all coarse cereals in the prison, no tasty food here except for Spring Festival.

Life was extremely difficult for the men once they were released. Most had lost their jobs. Boliang’s mill was reluctant to re-employ him, so he did odd jobs for many years. Many also lost their entitlement to old-age pensions.

Director Du was only in his thirties when he was released from prison. He said that this was also the case with many of his friends. But he saw himself as lucky because some of his friends were sentenced for life. On the other hand, Master Li was very angry about his treatment:

When I was [released] in 1987, everyone discriminated against me and I didn’t ask help from the government either. … I had no job after I was released. I came back home in 1987 after three years’ prison life without a job. But I had to work for survival and food. I did what I could and survived. … The government declared me guilty and destroyed my whole life; it was caused by the Communist Party. … It is impossible for me to work for the Communist Party. Because once the Communist Party declares you guilty, you will be discharged from public employment. If I had not been sentenced to prison, I would now be retired with 40 years’ standing.

Director Du told us about how the categorisation of hooliganism (as homosexual) meant that you were treated unjustly from then on:

But who could complain about the injustice done to you? Nobody could! Then the unit dismissed me in my thirties. Just because of sexual relationships, all our lives were gone and shot, how unjust it was for us! It was so terrible! … It really destroyed many people, really destroyed us! I was one in the [gay] circle.

Post-reform

While the major crackdowns on homosexual men happened in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miss Wei talks about arrests occurring long after that:

In 1989, homosexuals were cracked down on by the public security bureau; it actually lasted until the 1990s, even until 1995. I mean you could get arrested easily. I personally experienced it a few times. In the 1980s and 1990s, … Bridge was a popular place [for homosexuals to gather]. I was arrested by a sub-bureau of the public security bureau.

However, Tanner argues (Tanner H, 2000: 21), the Strike Hard Blows campaign was a dismal failure in terms of the regulation of sexuality. By the 1990s, the emphasis on charging and punishing homosexual men for the crime of hooliganism moved onto prostitution, and there was a concerted effort by the Chinese state to rid China of sex workers. This too failed to have lasting effects.

Since the bleak era of ‘reform’, there have been major improvements in the lives of homosexual men – particularly since the new millennium. Hooliganism was finally removed from the Criminal Law in 1997. In 2001, the China Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as a pathology from the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders. This, to some extent, was the first time that there was any form of state recognition that homosexuality did not constitute a social, moral or spiritual disorder. BJ states:

Society has been improving. Nowadays, terms such as ‘the crime of hooliganism’ are not heard of, and are cancelled. Homosexuality isn’t counted as prurience. Generally speaking, you can just do what you want (although not in public). I think true love should be allowed between two men.

While the gay community in China ‘has much work left to do before achieving full civil rights’ (Wu, 2003: 137), there is a local transformation by which gay men are beginning to acknowledge their identities (Yip Lo Kam, 2015), and the state and public are also beginning to acknowledge homosexuality. As Kama argues, ‘[t]his trajectory is conducive for the gradual burgeoning of tongzhi meeting places, commercial venues and organisations alongside communication media’ (2017: 238). But it is important to remember that these gains may be fragile, and not to forget the relatively unacknowledged events of this dark period in the history of homosexuality in China. Master Li says:

So many years have passed. I will tell the story to the next generation if there is an opportunity. Besides, we have suffered much during the past decades because of such treatment. I have been thinking whether the government can give us [the men arrested] some compensation.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the notion of hooliganism as it has been applied to the criminalisation of homosexuality in China from the Cultural Revolution through to the period of reform. Hooliganism – whether as part of catch-all laws or as a criminal offence in its own right – is part of the new China’s concern with the moral dimension of widespread social change and, in particular, with the regulation of sexuality in a new nation. Hooliganism was part and parcel of setting moral boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and a desire for a public and social order which expunges from its midst that which is ‘other’. According to Bauman (2000), the desire for law and order is a desperate attempt to impose uniformity and predictability on the human world, and for him hooliganism laws would represent, in their moral focus and policing of individual virtue, evidence of anxiety around the maintenance of social order in a time of massive change. Many Chinese scholars have written about this anxiety – one that drove parts of the Cultural Revolution and also the crackdowns of the late 1970s and 1980s. Liang (2005: 394) argues that in both periods there was a need for a moral boundary to strengthen the public sense of the collective, and that the expurgation of hooligans through harsh punishment re-created social order There are limits to bringing Bauman to bear on Chinese law – which has its own distinctive history. Huang (2015) points out that Chinese law has always – even, and perhaps especially, under Communism – been premised on social stability and concerned with ensuring virtuous behaviour, rather than being based on principles of justice and individual rights, and has been developed to serve quite different principles than those of Western law. Where Bauman talks about the imposition of ‘order and norms’ in China, it might be more properly ‘order and virtue’. But ultimately, while it is important to note these distinctions, as the law has been brought to bear on homosexuals in China, both codes can be said to ‘promote the “proper” by sharpening the sights on the improper’, to operate by exclusion and excision, and to ‘single out, circumscribe and stigmatize parts of reality denied the right to exist’ (Bauman, 2000: 206).

From liberation onwards, far from being free to express their sexuality and loves openly, homosexual men in China were among those who were being actively ‘excised’ from society and ‘denied the right to exist’. The new amended Criminal Law was based on a judicial principle that all crimes were to be prescribed expressly by law and anything outside of that – such as sex between men – could not be punished (pers. comm. Zhang Youchun, 2011). Yet there are still offences which could conceivably be brought to bear on homosexual men, such as ‘assembled prurience’.