What is it about?
This article traces how Helen Nissenbaum's theory of contextual integrity traveled into Chinese legal scholarship and changed along the way. Contextual integrity asks whether information flows fit the social context in which they occur. In China, the theory has become especially influential in debates about privacy, personal information protection, and data governance. Based on a dataset of 171 CSSCI journal articles, the article reconstructs how Chinese scholars first used contextual integrity mainly as a tool for interpreting legal texts and solving practical problems, and later began to treat Chinese-social contexts as sources for revising the theory itself. The article shows how translation, the Civil Code, the Personal Information Protection Law, and debates over public information and sensitive personal information all shaped this transformation.
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Why is it important?
Privacy theories do not travel unchanged. When a concept developed in U.S. information ethics enters Chinese legal scholarship, it is translated, narrowed, expanded, and contested through local legal institutions and social problems. This article shows that contextual integrity in China is no longer only a borrowed theory used to explain privacy law. It has become a framework through which Chinese scholars debate how privacy norms should be built, tested, and revised. The study matters for privacy law, comparative law, China studies, and data governance because it explains how global theories become local legal knowledge, and how local debates can feed back into global privacy theory. It also helps readers understand why context has become such a central idea in Chinese discussions of personal information protection, AI governance, and digital regulation.
Perspectives
I wrote this article to understand why contextual integrity has become so influential in Chinese legal scholarship, and why Chinese legal scholars, rather than philosophers or computer scientists, became its main community of reception. The article argues that the Chinese story is not simply one of importing a Western theory. It is a process of reinterpretation and reflexive reconstruction. Chinese scholars first used contextual integrity to interpret legal texts and respond to regulatory change. More recently, they have used Chinese social and legal contexts to question and revise the theory itself. This shift reveals a broader intellectual movement: China is not only an object to which privacy theory is applied, but also a context from which privacy theory can be rethought.
Chanhou Lou
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contextual Integrity Theory in China: An Intellectual History from Interpretation to Reflexivity, January 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6227658.
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