Contextualizing Personal Information: Privacy's Post-Neoliberal Constitutionalism and Its Heterogeneous Imperfections in China

This article examines the evolutionary trajectory of perceptual diversification concerning Yinsi, privacy, and personal information in China. It elucidates how efforts to integrate privacy within the constitutional framework, a complex undertaking, have resulted in a heterogeneous system. This system forges an economically rational, technologically trustworthy, and socially experimental infrastructure that simultaneously embodies materialist and post-neoliberal characteristics. The study traces the transformation from collectivist and charismatic conceptualization to judicial unevenness arising from the unwritten nature of de-constitutionalized privacy. This evolution ultimately leads to digital incentive compatibility, reflecting a pressure-driven post-neoliberal economic rationale. Personal information with Chinese characteristics represents a normative construct aimed at harmonizing economic liberties and enhancing market efficiency while exemplifying sovereign statecraft of data production relations. The article underscores China's paternalist yet inertial adaptability, manifested in its pursuit of legal and institutional reforms concerning social identity, shaping socio-economic and performance legitimacy structures. Furthermore, the study introduces a tripartite cognitive and infrastructural schema of identifiability, incorporating legal, technological, and social dimensions to highlight the interchangeable roles that the state, private sector, and individuals have played in institutionalizing identities. The inherent complexities of such systems might expose them to market inefficiencies and digital harms, particularly when hierarchical interventions deviate from the original economic intention of data production and circulation. Consequently, the article advocates for elevating privacy constitutionalism to a more explicit and codified status in both legislative and judicial domains. This elevation would confer formal authority to address imbalances and unchecked competing interests in public and private stakeholderism, ultimately striving for a polycentric and proportionate (re-)equilibrium between the normative efficiency of identity infrastructures and the preservation of moral rights in digital China.