In the 2010s, Chinese LGBTQ advocates began using impact litigation and other legal strategies to advance claims for equal rights. What were the results of this approach? Former director of LGBT Rights Advocacy China, Peng Yanhui, reflects on the past decade of his work and what the future holds for China’s LGBTQ movement in a time of political closing and backlash.

Darius Longarino (龙大瑞) is a Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Paul Tsai China Center. Prior to joining the Center, he worked for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative in Beijing where he managed legal reform programs promoting LGBT rights and worked cooperatively with a number of Chinese public interest law organizations. Darius speaks and reads Mandarin Chinese, and received a J.D. from Columbia Law School (2013), where he was a Kent scholar and received the Edwin Parker Prize for Excellence in Comparative or International Law. As a law student, he interned with a legal aid organization in New York, a public interest law organization in China, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Court of International Trade. Prior to law school, he was an assistant to Professor Jerome A. Cohen at New York University School of Law's US-Asia Law Institute.

Yanhui Peng is a researcher at the Nankai University Zhou Enlai School of Government’s Institute on Community Development and the former director of LGBT Rights Advocacy China. Peng founded LGBT Rights Advocacy China in 2013 to advance LGBT equality through China’s legal system. LGBT Rights Advocacy China built professional networks of lawyers and journalists, and supported impact litigation against conversion therapy, employment discrimination, media censorship, and homophobic university textbooks. In 2019, Peng and his colleagues started a campaign to submit proposals to lawmakers that called for legalizing same-sex marriage in China’s Civil Code, catalyzing a large number of submissions and drawing significant attention to the issue. From 2007 to 2013, Peng was a program manager at Sun Yat-Sen University’s Institute for Civil Society, and in 2019 he was a visiting scholar at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. At the Paul Tsai China Center, Peng will conduct research and writing on the parental rights of LGBT people.

This event was organized by the Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies and sponsored by the Society for Chinese Law, Columbia OutLaws, and the Equal Rights Amendment Project.