Rules for thee but not for me: Selective privacy enforcement in Chinese court judgments

Against the backdrop of digital transformation, governments worldwide have enacted privacy laws to safeguard personal information, yet their judicial enforcement remains understudied. This article develops a selective privacy enforcement perspective and evaluates it using an original dataset of 6,370 civil and criminal judgments collected from China. We argue that, in authoritarian legal systems, privacy laws may be enforced more effectively against private actors than against public institutions or state-connected defendants. The findings provide partial support for this perspective, principally in civil litigation. Plaintiffs fare substantially worse when suing public organizations than when pursuing claims against private actors. In criminal cases, however, defendants affiliated with public organizations receive no statistically detectable advantage over unaffiliated defendants. PIPL invocation is associated with longer prison sentences and larger fines, regardless of state affiliation. These findings cast doubt on the proposition that political connections uniformly protect privacy offenders. Instead, they suggest that privacy enforcement may depend on how the state views the threat of privacy violations. This study underscores the importance of privacy laws in protecting personal information on the one hand, while highlighting their limitations within authoritarian contexts on the other.