Decriminalization (去罪化)

Decriminalization means the law no longer treats consensual same-sex acts as a crime. Almost everywhere, it is the first rung on the ladder of LGBTQ+ legal progress — a jurisdiction stops punishing before it starts protecting.

In mainland China the landmark year is 1997. The revised Criminal Law repealed the offense of liumang zui — “hooliganism”, a notoriously elastic catch-all charge that had sometimes been applied to sex between men. Since then, consensual same-sex acts between adults have not been a crime in mainland China. The year is commonly paired with 2001, when the Chinese diagnostic manual CCMD-3 stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder — together cited as the mainland’s “decriminalization and depathologization” milestones.

Register note: standard in formal, legal, and academic writing. Keep its scope precise: decriminalization describes criminal law only. It does not imply recognition — mainland China today has no same-sex marriage, no partnership registry, and no national anti-discrimination protections, yet same-sex acts are entirely legal.

Common misreading: inferring that pre-1997 China had a specific “homosexuality crime.” It never did; prosecution ran through the catch-all hooliganism charge. The opposite error — “being gay is illegal in China” — is equally wrong; see the myth-busting page.