Individual bankruptcy disqualification constitutes a critical element in establishing a personal insolvency framework, yet China’s current legislation lacks a mature system for it, and academic consensus on its conceptual foundation remains elusive. Both the punitive doctrine based on culpability for bankruptcy and the deterrence function aimed at preventing abuse of the bankruptcy system encounter interpretative challenges and value misalignments when applied to disqualification. Given the value orientation of personal bankruptcy legislation and the practical imperatives of debtor rehabilitation and creditor satisfaction, the origin and legitimacy of disqualification must be grounded in Interest Jurisprudence. This necessitates a threefold approach: firstly, applying interest balancing based on identified interest conflicts; secondly, weighing three pairs of interests—economic versus conceptual, general versus specific, and internal versus external; finally, adopting a moderate disqualification model in China’s legislation, establishing personal creditworthiness as the core adjudicative standard, creating defensible grounds against disqualification, and constructing a system incorporating both consensual and statutory disqualification models.