When Compliance Infrastructure Becomes a Security Object: Legal Reclassification between EU Supply Chain Due Diligence and China’s Order No. 834

Abstract

Supply chain law increasingly renders global production governable through compliance infrastructure: supplier mapping, audit rights, traceability records, risk scoring, geolocation data, contractual monitoring, digital platforms and cross-border evidence flows. This article argues that such infrastructure is no longer merely a technical means of implementing sustainability law. At the interface between European Union (EU) sustainability instruments and China’s State Council Order No. 834, the same practice that appears as sustainability compliance in one legal order may be reclassified under another as security-relevant information gathering, discriminatory disruption or conduct affecting industrial and supply chain security. The article examines how compliance infrastructure can become a security object and identifies three connected sites of legal reclassification: evidence production, supplier leverage and evidence circulation. It contributes to risk regulation scholarship by directing attention from the content of compliance duties to the infrastructures through which those duties are performed and contested, while showing that Order No. 834 is better understood as a set of legality filters and escalation tools than as a blanket prohibition on EU sustainability compliance.