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POLICY AND PRACTICE REVIEWS article

Front. Public Health

Sec. Public Health Policy

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1670119

This article is part of the Research TopicInnovative Strategies for Urban Public Health Resilience in Crisis SituationsView all 32 articles

A Study of Chinese Law on Restricting Personal Liberty for Public Health Protection: taking the COVID-19 epidemic as the entry point

Provisionally accepted
Tengfei  LiuTengfei LiuZhongwu  MaZhongwu Ma*
  • Shandong University, Jinan, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, China adopted restrictive measures such as mandatory quarantine, health code management, and community lockdowns. These actions were effective in containing the epidemic but often lacked clear legal authorization or procedural safeguards, raising concerns about excessive restrictions on personal liberty. From a legal and policy perspective, this paper examines the statutory framework that enabled such measures, focusing on the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases and the Emergency Response Law. It argues that vague authorization and weak procedural constraints left space for local governments to exercise discretionary overreach, exemplified by excessive lockdowns and misuse of digital tools. Building on constitutional principles, the study highlights how legality, necessity, and proportionality should be fundamental limits on emergency powers. It shows that the absence of detailed procedures and rights-protection mechanisms undermined these principles, leading to conflicts between public health and human rights. The paper contributes to Chinese public health law scholarship by clarifying these institutional weaknesses and by proposing reforms to strengthen procedural guarantees, judicial oversight, and regulation of digital surveillance tools. In doing so, it advances understanding of how to balance civil liberties with collective security in future public health crises.

Keywords: COVID-19, Public Health, Personal freedom, Administrative enforcement, Principle of proportionality

Received: 21 Jul 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Liu and Ma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Zhongwu Ma, m19236151199709@126.com

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