Digital Legacy Governance: Exploring a Chinese Path under the Civil Code in Light of International Models

Abstract

Digital legacy indicates the bundle of accounts, data and digital assets that continue to exist after a natural person’s death. This paper addresses three questions: what policy-ready definition and taxonomy of “digital legacy” best guide governance; how comparative regimes perform in practice; and what China-specific pathway under the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China (CCPRC) can effectuate user intent, protect post-mortem dignity and third-party privacy, and enable lawful succession at scale. Using a comparative doctrinal and policy-analysis approach, the study triangulates primary legal sources (statutes, regulations, case law), official platform documentation and 2022-2025 peer-reviewed scholarship. It first consolidates a functional taxonomy spanning direct-value digital assets, derivative-value accounts and sentimental/cultural records. It then synthesizes international experience: the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) authority hierarchy in the United States; the EU’s exclusion of deceased persons in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) paired with Member-State rules (e.g., France’s post-mortem directives); Germany’s inheritable-contract doctrine; evolving industry guidance; and heterogeneous platform tooling (designation, memorialization, export and scoped access). Building on these findings, the paper proposes a China roadmap that clarifies concepts and authority, mandates privacy-preserving, auditable disclosure via standardized evidence packages and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and scales pre-death designations through usable defaults. The contribution is a layered governance model—statutory baselines, standards, platform implementation and user planning—that is legally coherent, operationally feasible and culturally sensitive.