Legislative discourse of digital governance: a corpus-driven comparative study of laws in the European Union and China

Abstract Based on the self-compiled corpora of the European Union and Chinese laws on data governance, this study adopts a corpus-driven approach to comparatively study the legislative design of the EU and China on digital governance, especially on key issues such as data protection, data processing and utilization, and cross-border data transfer. It is found through corpus analysis that the EU has developed a relatively comprehensive data protection system, which internally focuses on the protection of individual data rights and externally sets high standards on the cross-border transfer of data. Despite the data protection paradigm as it manifests, the EU is facing new challenges on data exportation, data jurisdiction in the competitive digital marketplace. Shared the same concern on the data protection legislation, Chinese data law has made significant progress in personal data protection with the nascent enactment of Data Security Law and Personal Data Protection Law. Notably, Chinese legislation features the hierarchal taxonomy of data under the principle of the national security exception, while it requires more legislative skills, flexible response mechanisms, and more subordinate laws to prevent future data security threats. Moreover, the corpus-driven method conducted in this study provides evidential insights for the comparative legal textual studies across jurisdictions.