Rights Defense Commentary: The ills of a catch-all crime — the distorted enforcement of the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, and its chilling effect

Special commentator: Jiang Wenshan

The Analects says: “If punishments are not properly applied, the people will not know where to put their hands and feet.” The crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble was separated from the former crime of hooliganism. Its original purpose was to fill a regulatory gap between public security penalties and serious criminal offenses, and to precisely target disturbances that undermine public order. Its legislative intent had a real-world necessity. Yet for some time, enforcement of this crime has repeatedly overstepped and expanded its reach, gradually turning it from a “last-resort shield for public order” into a catch-all charge that “can hold anything.” Lawyers have proposed abolishing it, but their objections have never been to the value of establishing the offense itself. Rather, they have decried the chaotic way it is enforced: when enforcement is inaccurate and discretion runs unchecked, even the best legislative design can be distorted into shackles that leave everyone feeling unsafe.

Its first failing is blurred boundaries and an overabundance of flexible standards for determining whether conduct qualifies. The four categories of conduct defined in the law originally had clear targets, but core elements such as “egregious circumstances” and “causing serious disorder in public places” have never had consistent, quantified judicial criteria, leaving grassroots law enforcement with almost unconstrained room for interpretation. As a result, civil debt disputes are classified as “forcibly taking or demanding property,” ordinary petitioning for redress is labeled “causing a disturbance,” and neighborhood quarrels, online criticism, real-name reports, and even emotional expression may all be swept into the categories of “insulting or intimidating” or “causing trouble and disrupting order.” What should have been the “last line of defense” in criminal regulation has instead become a “universal key” for grassroots governance. The popular quip “the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble is a basket you can put anything into” has never been an exaggeration; it reflects how reality appears after countless individual cases have piled up.

Its second failing is its chilling effect, which quietly drains vitality from society. Once the deterrent force of criminal punishment spills beyond its proper bounds, the harm extends far beyond the individuals in particular cases. When ordinary people have to weigh whether a comment might count as “picking a quarrel,” worry that an attempt to defend their rights might be deemed “causing trouble,” and fear that criticism and oversight of public affairs might be classified as “making a disturbance,” society as a whole falls into a spiral of silence and self-censorship. As the ancients said, “Preventing people from speaking is more dangerous than trying to prevent a river from flooding.” When citizens, afraid of committing an offense, voluntarily narrow the bounds of what they say and give up reasonable demands, the corrective function of public opinion and the checks provided by social oversight both continue to shrink. Order may appear stable, but in reality everything falls silent; governance may appear efficient, but what it spends down is society’s vitality and public trust. The hidden cost of leaving everyone feeling unsafe damages society’s foundations far more than convictions in individual cases.

Its third failing is a mismatch in function and the abandonment of the principle that criminal law should be restrained. Criminal law is society’s last resort for governance, and restraint is an inviolable limit. Yet in some approaches to grassroots governance, the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble has become the cheapest and most efficient shortcut to maintaining stability: faced with disputes, officials skip the painstaking work of mediation, guidance, and protecting rights, and instead resort to criminal measures to arrest people and be done with it, substituting criminal law for civil remedies and administrative action. This may appear to quickly suppress a situation, but in reality it turns civil problems into criminal confrontations and transforms claims of interest into conflicts between enemies. As the ancients said, “When punishments are abused, government is ruined; when government is ruined, the people disperse.” Using a catch-all crime to secure superficial calm for a time cannot bring lasting stability; it only keeps accumulating the risks of social conflict.

Even more concerning is the systemic absence of mechanisms for correcting errors. Once a case is opened on suspicion of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, the process tends to slide forward with strong momentum, escalating from detention to arrest to prosecution. Even if the final classification is wrong or the evidence insufficient, those involved have often already paid multiple costs: detention, a ruined reputation, and the destruction of their work and personal lives. Exoneration is difficult, accountability is difficult, and restoring one’s reputation is difficult. The heavy cost of enforcement errors is borne almost entirely by ordinary individuals.

To be fair, the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble is not inherently a bad law. It still serves an irreplaceable regulatory purpose in dealing with genuine street harassment, group disturbances, bullying, and similar conduct. If it can be enforced precisely and impartially, with a firm boundary between crime and non-crime, the offense itself poses no problem. The real source of the problem has never been the legislation itself, but distorted enforcement, excessive discretion, and a lack of oversight.

The debate over abolishing or retaining the offense has never really been about whether public order should be maintained; it is about whether the boundaries of criminal rule of law should be upheld. Rather than fixating on whether the offense should remain, efforts should go toward tightening the institutional constraints: clarify the criteria for determining whether it applies, narrow the room for flexible interpretation, uphold the principle of restraint, and strengthen procedural checks. This would return the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble to its legislative purpose of punishing disruptive conduct and protecting public order, instead of making it a catch-all shackle that obscures citizens’ expectations of what conduct is permitted and suppresses social vitality. After all, the essence of the rule of law is not to leave everyone feeling unsafe, but to let everyone feel secure.