China’s digital sovereignty and the strengthening of traditional values in the everyday digital environment

The article examines the emergence of China’s digital sovereignty as both a legal mechanism for controlling data and content and a tool of cultural policy. It shows how rules on jurisdictional priority and cross-border data transfers are coupled with value-oriented regulators - from the Provisions on the Governance of the Online Information Content Ecosystem to the Party’s programmatic Opinion on “online civilization.” Consequently, the state, platforms, and users jointly “co-govern” the digital environment, where the idioms of “positive energy” and “spiritual (online) civilization” set everyday behavioral standards. The paper argues that the Chinese model fuses public law, cybersecurity, and cultural heritage into a single normative architecture that reproduces traditional values in digital daily life while strengthening the competitiveness of the national digital ecosystem.