China

In China, Article 300 of the Criminal Law, and the accompanying regulations and judicial interpretations, is the most ostensible legal tool. It provides the legal basis for direct criminalization of participation in religious groups designated as an evil cult. The survey of cases confirms that once the procuratorate had made the decision to prosecute, the judicial threshold of involvement that would sustain conviction is low. This direct suppression of evil cult is accompanied by the vigorous use of the rape provision to punish religious sexual fraud. At first glance, the statutory provision—which did not stipulate that the use of fraud to obtain sex is rape—is ill-suited for the task. Nonetheless, the Chinese courts overcome this hurdle by applying a robust—if messy and inconsistent—interpretative approach. This approach regards all religious sexual fraud as rape regardless of whether there is coercion or mistake as to the sexual nature of the act. Once this doctrinal hurdle is overcome, conviction is a near certainty given the Chinese courts’ unquestioned premise that such religious claims are false. The criminal offence of swindling is also regularly used to prosecute religious property fraud. The doctrinal dimension is straightforward in China: the statutory provision explicitly provided for fraud as the core actus reus, and there is no articulated constitutional concerns about religious freedom. Thus, the only issue is falsity. The surveyed court judgments reveal that all forms of superstition activities—even seemingly mundane fortune-telling and luck-improvement rituals that are common Chinese religious practices—are considered to be fraudulent in nature and sufficient to sustain convictions.