G-IPTech Lecture: Tackling cyberbullying – China’s recent law and policy initiatives

Speaker: Dr. Mei Ning YAN is a visiting scholar at the School of Law, Queen’s University of Belfast. Dr. Yan specializes in media law and has written on China’s defamation law, privacy law, and media regulation. She has taught at the Hong Kong Baptist University, The University of Hong Kong, and Shantou University. She worked as a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s covering Hong Kong and Greater China.

Abstract: It is widely known that the authorities have an extremely firm grip on what can be communicated on the Internet in China. However, strange enough, cyberbullying has for years been a very common phenomenon there. Moreover, such online abuses have not been specifically addressed by the government. Mostly, victims of cyberbullying can only resort to bringing civil lawsuits, relying on claims that their reputation has been damaged or that their privacy have been violated. These legal remedies are meagre and, apparently, cannot stop further incidents of cyberbullying from happening.

Things took a sudden turn in the past couple of years after several tragedies resulting from cyberbullying. One such incident occurred in early 2022, when a teenage orphan, Liu Xuezhou, committed suicide because of cyberbullying. His heart-breaking story illustrated how toxic and rampant online abuses have been and attracted huge public attention. Indeed, the authorities were under a great deal of pressure to act. Several policy documents addressing cyberbullying were announced in 2022, soon after Liu’s death. These were followed by a draft legislation in 2023.

This talk will describe several high-profile cyberbullying cases in China, the trend of cyberbullying over the years, as well as examine whether the new regulatory measures can be effective. The talk will also compare these measures with the approaches adopted in the United Kingdom, European Union, and the United States.