Instrumentalization of Criminal Law in the Governance of House Churches in China: An Empirical Analysis of Judicial Practice (2015–2025)

This study examines the instrumentalization of criminal law in the governance of unregistered Protestant house churches in China during the period 2015–2025. The study asks how prosecutorial actors deploy multiple criminal provisions to construct a system of governance through criminal law, and what judicial application patterns reveal about the functional role of courts within this system. Drawing on a database of approximately 113 legal documents—including approximately 40 religious cases and 65 non-religious control cases—assembled through the author’s professional practice as a criminal defense attorney and through a professional network of Chinese legal practitioners, providing access to materials unavailable to external researchers through conventional research channels, the study develops the concept of criminal compliance architecture: a system of overlapping criminal provisions (Articles 225, 293, 266, and 300 of the Criminal Law) that, when deployed interchangeably against religious organizational activity, render legal compliance structurally impossible. The empirical findings document five principal patterns: the dominance of Article 300 at approximately 63 percent of primary charges; multi-charge prosecution rates of 55 percent (compared to 20 percent in the control group); compliance-signaling sentencing in which suspended sentences are conditioned on organizational renunciation; temporal concentration in the post-2018 period; and geographic clustering with province-specific charge preferences. The legal analysis documents patterns consistent with courts functioning as processors of compliance outcomes rather than as independent adjudicators. The study further demonstrates that the compliance architecture possesses a self-concealing property that systematically suppresses the information flows on which international monitoring institutions depend. The study carries implications for USCIRF, the U.S. Department of State,