Beyond the liberal legal subject: Relational responsibility, relational autonomy, and the sealing of minor criminal records in China

Criminal records now circulate as persistent digital traces across state databases, commercial background-check systems, and algorithmic infrastructures, creating enduring barriers to social reintegration. This article argues that prevailing sealing regimes, grounded in a liberal conception of the autonomous legal subject who bears individual responsibility for the consequences of past conduct, overlook how record-related harms are produced relationally and structurally, affecting families, employers, and other connected parties who bear no culpability. Through a doctrinal comparison of sealing regimes in the United States, Scandinavia, Canada, and China, this research identifies three structural deficits: the absence of relational harm mapping, the framing of sealing as information control rather than autonomy restoration, and binary responsibility allocation. To address these deficits, the article proposes a Relational Sealing Model comprising relational harm identification, relational autonomy restoration, and relational responsibility redistribution. This model reframes sealing as a forward-looking project of relational justice, in which the state, market actors, and digital platforms share responsibility for rebuilding the conditions for meaningful reintegration.