The Civil Code bars forging a face before any platform rule does

The figure or the record

China's Civil Code (中华人民共和国民法典) was adopted by the National People's Congress on 28 May 2020 and, by its own final article, took effect on 1 January 2021. Chapter 4 of its personality-rights book, Articles 1018 to 1023, is the portrait-rights chapter a face licence in China ultimately has to satisfy. Article 1018 gives every natural person the right to make, use, disclose or licence their own portrait. Article 1019 is the operative bar for generated media: it forbids any organisation or individual from infringing a portrait right by defacement, defamation, or 'forging by means of information technology', and it requires the portrait holder's consent before anyone makes, uses or discloses their likeness, subject only to exceptions set out elsewhere in law.

What the documents establish

The adoption date and the application date are distinct events the text itself separates: Article 1260 states the Code 'shall come into force on 1 January 2021', more than seven months after the legislature passed it, and the intervening period was used to align older laws the Code superseded. Read together, Articles 1021 and 1022 establish that a licensing contract's ambiguous terms are interpreted in the portrait holder's favour and that a licence of indefinite duration can be ended by either side with reasonable notice. Article 1023 then extends this framework beyond images: protection of a natural person's voice is applied 'by reference to' the portrait-rights provisions, which is the textual basis Chinese practitioners cite when treating a cloned voice as a portrait-adjacent right rather than an unregulated one.

Scope and caveats

The Code states a civil right and its exceptions; it does not itself set penalties or define 'information technology forgery' with technical precision, matters left to later rules such as the deep-synthesis provisions. Article 1020 permits some uses without consent, including teaching, unavoidable news reporting, and public-interest display, narrowing but not eliminating the licence requirement a vertical-drama production needs to satisfy. A working face-licensing platform's own transaction rules show the portrait right operationalised as an active, order-specific consent step, though the statute establishes the standard rather than how consistently platforms apply it.

What to watch

Editorially, the figure worth tracking is not the statute's text, which is fixed, but how deep-synthesis and face-licensing rules issued under it are enforced against specific platforms, since that practice record is what will show whether Article 1019's forgery bar has real teeth in the AI-drama market.

• Does a production's consent paperwork name the specific project, use and duration, as Article 1021's interpretive rule anticipates a licence should?
• Is a cloned voice being treated with the same consent standard Article 1023 extends from portrait rights, or as an unregulated asset?
• Which later administrative rule, rather than the Code itself, is doing the enforcement work in a given dispute?

A licensing platform's terms of service sit downstream of this chapter, not beside it, and a claim that a Chinese face licence is 'legally binding' is only as strong as its fit with Articles 1018 to 1023 and the consent they require.