"Dongguan residents, pay attention, please. Illegal cohabitation will be detained. " Yesterday, an online "Landlord Notice" aroused hot discussion.

The notice claims that Dongguan police is investigating rent housing. If a man and a woman live together but could not provide a marriage certificate, police will detain them for illegal cohabitation.

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There have also been messages on Sina Weibo saying, "Humen police will detain couples without marriage certificate for 3 months", "living together without marriage certificates will be regarded as illegal cohabitation" and "7000 people were arrested in Dalang and Tangxia".

Dongguan Public Security Bureau dismissed as plain rumor those claims that a man and a woman who live together without a marriage certificate will be arrested, and Dongguan police wrote on its official Sina Weibo last night that these are all "false information".

"If it proves that they are couples and it is not related to prostitution, they will be fine," the bureau clarified.

A bureau policeman, however, confirmed that they have been working on rent housing investigations but only for security purposes and not as a prostitution crackdown.

Fenfei Li, an associate professor at Renmin University of China's Law school, says that according to Chinese laws, if a married person is publicly living with another party in the guise of being husband and wife, he or she is violating the law on bigamy and their illegal cohabitation bears legal liability. 

In China, Bigamy is a civil case; courts will not take up the case unless there is a plaintiff. If two parties are living together but do not have spouses, then they are not breaking the law even if they are not legally married.

Hongliang Liang, a lawyer from Beijing Weiyu Law firm, also points out that illegal cohabitation has not been criminalized, so couples living in such a situation will generally not be punished except in cases of monetary dispute.