Platformised Justice and the Cultural Politics of Consent: Digital Vigilantism in Chinese Sex-Crime Disputes

This article explores how digital media shape the cultural politics of sexual consent and harassment in contemporary China. It examines two high-profile cases, the 2023 Datong engagement-rape judgment and the 2023–2025 Wuhan University sexual harassment lawsuit, to show how cultural expectations surrounding intimacy and marriage, evidentiary disputes and platform logics reshape popular understandings of justice and the authority of courts. Drawing on a mixed-methods content analysis of commentary on Zhihu and Xiaohongshu, the study traces how cultural expectations around intimacy were reframed as entitlement to sex, how judicial caution was translated into accusations of zero-cost claims and how complex forensic disputes were compressed into viral binaries of innocence or guilt. Remarkably, both Zhihu and Xiaohongshu, platforms often characterised as having different gendered user cultures, displayed strikingly similar discursive patterns, suggesting misogynistic narratives circulated across platform boundaries despite differences in user culture. The analysis highlights how media infrastructures displace punitive authority from legal institutions to digital publics, where practices of doxxing, blacklisting and reputational shaming operate as digital vigilantism. Overall, the article situates Chinese sex-crime debates within wider discussions of crime, media and culture, demonstrating how platformised justice reinforces misogynistic narratives while also enabling feminist legal consciousness.