A routine administrative notice from a rural Sichuan court has exposed something far from routine: more than 30 courts and procuratorates across at least ten Chinese provinces cited a non-existent regulation as the legal basis for official seal changes — and the error went undetected for at least six years. China's state news agency Xinhua, in an unusually direct editorial rebuke, called the affair a symptom of "perfunctory work style and formalism" corroding grassroots governance.
The phantom document, variously named the "Regulations on Seal Management of the People's Republic of China" or a "Ministry of Public Security Seal Management Regulation," has never been enacted. China's Ministry of Public Security has confirmed that neither version exists in any form.
How a Copy-Paste Error Spread Across Dozens of Courts
The trail leads back to early 2025, when the Batang County People's Court in Sichuan announced it was replacing a worn official seal. The notice cited the non-existent regulation alongside a genuine 2002 Supreme People's Court directive — lending it an air of procedural legitimacy that went unchallenged. A member of the public later flagged that one of the two cited documents had no legal existence whatsoever.
What unfolded afterward was more troubling than the original error. Since at least 2019, more than 30 judicial bodies had reproduced the same fabricated citation in their own seal notices. Court staff, when reached for comment, said they had simply modeled their announcements on those issued by other courts. In the most serious cases, the phantom regulation appeared not just in administrative notices but in actual judicial documents, cited as the basis for rulings.
Xinhua described the root cause plainly: staff drafted official documents without conducting basic legal verification, on the logic that if other institutions wrote it that way, it must be correct. The agency characterized this as "using plagiarism to replace genuine work" — a cutting phrase in the context of Chinese bureaucratic accountability.
A Legislative Gap That Invited Fiction
A legitimate framework does govern court seal management — the Supreme People's Court issued a directive on the subject in 2002. What does not exist is a unified national-level seal management regulation, the very document dozens of courts invented on paper to fill the void.
Legal commentators on mainland platforms have argued this gap created institutional pressure. Grassroots judicial staff, expected to anchor official documents in higher-level legal authority, appear to have manufactured a regulatory basis rather than acknowledging that none existed. The result, as observers put it, was a law so insubstantial it existed only in the air — yet was collectively "inhaled" by institutions across the country. The term "ghost law" quickly took hold on Chinese social media.
Why Multi-Stage Review Failed to Stop It
Particularly striking is that the flawed notices reportedly passed through standard multi-stage editorial and legal review before publication — a process mainland party and government bodies are required to follow. Independent scholars and commentators have questioned why no reviewer verified whether the cited regulation was real.
An anonymous Chinese blogger, speaking to Storm Media, pointed to "residual formalism and bureaucratism": staff defaulting to copy-paste rather than conducting legal searches, shielded by the assumption that institutional repetition confers legitimacy. The blogger warned that if errors of this kind migrated into actual case adjudication, the consequences would be considerably more serious than an embarrassing correction notice.
The episode sits in direct tension with the Chinese Communist Party's ongoing campaigns against formalism and for what officials have called "correct performance evaluation standards" in governance — making Xinhua's willingness to name the problem publicly all the more notable.
Corrections Made, But Credibility Questions Persist
Affected judicial bodies have begun withdrawing or correcting the flawed announcements and have pledged to strengthen internal review and staff training. Whether the Supreme People's Court will initiate a formal system-wide review remains unclear.
Xinhua framed the stakes in terms that went beyond administrative embarrassment: allowing such conduct to persist, the agency warned, "will ultimately erode the foundations of the rule of law, letting justice be tarnished." Legal scholars note that enacting an actual national seal management regulation would close the legislative gap that allowed the error to propagate unchecked — but the deeper problem, as Xinhua itself acknowledged, is a culture in which looking busy has come to substitute for getting things right. （Related： Beijing Watch | Chinese Ex-Soldier Who Spoke Out Against Russia's War Now Faces Deportation ｜ Latest ）
