Legislating and litigating same sex marriage in China

This chapter presents research on the strategies that Chinese LGB activists adopt in order to cope with the legal and political environment of the Chinese regime. Anchored in the peculiarities of the Chinese legal environment, the chapter considers two qualitative case studies. The first case involves Li Yinhe, a former professor with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who has repeatedly asked representatives at the National People’s Congress (NPC) to present a Chinese Same-Sex Marriage Bill as an amendment to the current marriage law. The second case comes from the study of the impact of litigation brought by Sun Wenlin and his same sex partner Hu Mingliang against a local civil affairs bureau in 2016. The chapter attends to the legal and rhetorical strategies adopted by these activists in order to carefully frame their objections to ensure they complied with the party-state’s emphasis on marital harmony (hexie) and social stability