Judging Data: Critical Discourse and the Rise of Data Intellectual Property Rights in Chinese Courts

This paper examines how Sino-judicial activism shapes Data Intellectual Property Rights (DIPR) in China through Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It identifies two complementary judicial discourses: local courts such as the Zhejiang High People’s Court (HCZJ) adopt a judicial continuation discourse that pragmatically extends intellectual property norms to data disputes, while the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) employs a judicial linkage discourse aligning judicial reasoning with national policy and administrative governance. Their interaction forms a Bidirectional Conceptual Coupling (BCC) – an “inside-out” projection of local court reasoning and an “outside-in” translation of policy into judicial interpretation by the SPC – that mutually legitimizes and constrains judicial and policy frameworks, balancing the demand for unified market standards with safeguards against platform-driven monopolization. Through cases such as the HCZJ’s Taobao v. Meijing and the SPC’s Anti-Unfair Competition Interpretation , the study shows DIPR as an experimental field for doctrinal innovation and institutional coordination in China’s evolving digital governance.